Those film viewers who equate foreign films with pretense need to sit down for a couple of hours and watch director Akira Kurosawa's first widescreen (Tohoscope) film, the black and white The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi-Toride No San-Akunin — literally "The Three Villains Of The Hidden Fortress"), from 1958. While it is a very good film, it a great movie in the feel good sense of the term. Filmmaker George Lucas claims this film was the inspiration for his third-rate Star Wars films. Yes, there are a handful of similarities, but "influence" is usually used when a great work of art is influenced by an equal or lesser work of art, not when bad art rips off greater art. In short, influence occurs in evolution, not devolution, and Lucas's claims bear the stench of a lesser artist trying to parasitically sponge off a greater artist's reputation.

The Hidden Fortress runs 139 minutes, but it never slows down nor gets boring. It is action and humor nonstop. Kurosawa reputedly made the film to repay Toho Studios for allowing him to make riskier, more artistic films like Ikiru and Rashomon. In many ways, even though the film stars the great Toshirô Mifune as General Rokurota Makabe — a role that is quite reserved in comparison to his other roles in period films also known as jidai-geki, from where Lucas got the term Jedi — the film's narrative and heart belong to the two peasant farmer fools. Tubby Tahei played by Minoru Chiaki (the good natured samurai from Seven Samurai) and tiny Matakishi played by Kamatari Fujiwara (the farmer Manzo from Seven Samurai) make a terrific comedy team. Their performance is far better than their supposed Star Wars stand-ins, R2D2 and C3PO. This duo not only get the most screen time, but the tale is basically from their point of view, and the viewer roots for them, despite their greed and stupidity constantly endangering them; whereas the more conventional tale of the Princess and her General is backgrounded and rather rote.

The plot is simple and the setting is war-torn feudal Japan, around the 1600s after guns have arrived. The film opens in media res, widescreen, on the backs of the two peasants. This great opening augurs the comic overturning of many action film clichés, since peasant backs are not what widescreen was developed for. They witness a samurai being killed by horsemen, but the horsemen do not bother with the peasants. Soon they quarrel and split up, but are captured by soldiers and finally reunited in a slave camp. The two friends soon escape from the slave camp during a prisoner revolt and progess down a series of stairs that are almost a direct quotation from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. They hide in the mountains and discover gold hidden in firewood. They encounter the General, who bullies them and lures them via their avarice into helping him plot a rescue of his clan's kingdom. The plan requires them to haul gold (echoes of John Huston's The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre) across enemy borders and help save the clan's Princess. Yukihime (Misa Uehara) is a precocious and beautiful sixteen year old — oddly in a Robin Hood-like getup — who pretends to be mute. The quartet eventually gathers a fifth member, a nameless slave girl (Toshiko Higuchi), who is willing to die for the Princess, much as the General's sister did, as a double for the princess — another plot point that Lucas borrowed for Star Wars.