The General kills some soldiers in a horseback chase and has a great spear fight duel with a rival clan's General Hyoe Tadokoro (Susumu Fujita), but spares his life. The General respects his foe (an element lifted from Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion), which in most films of this sort is an act of humiliation, but in this case turns out to have karmic power in the end. When the General, Princess, and slave girl are caught and about to be executed, Tadokoro frees them and helps them re-establish the Princess's clan. The two fools are caught with the gold they discovered after the trio had been caught and are jailed, but they are freed by the Princess and General and given some minor financial compensation for their help. As they walk down another huge set of stairs (in a refrain of the Battleship Potemkin quotation) they resolve to be friends and the film ends, although one knows they are mere seconds away from more bickering. It is an odd end, if not a weak one, but after such a rollicking ride, perhaps an exhalation is the right end.

There is not as much social depth nor commentary in this film, but it is great fun — almost what an "Abbott and Costello Meet the Samurai" film would have been like. There are many really funny moments in addition to the cowardly fools' repeated penchant for finding trouble. The teen Princess — never the Western stereotyped damsel in distress — barks out orders, even though half the time she is does not understand what she is saying. Perhaps the funniest scene is when the General captures two enemy soldiers after the two fools try to get more gold from a pyre where their wood with the gold inside was burnt. The two fools beat and bully the captives since they are no longer the lowest on the totem pole. There are also excellent action sequences, such as the scene when the General chases two other soldiers down on horseback before he meets and battles spears with Tadokoro. It is a realistic fight scene, and goes on for a while with both of the famed warriors clumsily missing each other. There is also humor in that scene, as the General picks out and rejects several "inferior" spears before settling on the one he will make battle with.

The chase scene on horseback also illustrates Kurosawa's mastery of the widescreen format in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Most directors emphasize the width of action in that format, whereas Kurosawa expanded the depth of field. For example, once Tadokoro helps the trio escape, they look out over a mountain to their territory and much depth of field is sharpened and its density heightened. However, in the chase scene, the camera moves diagonally, but with the riders and closeup, so that the twigs of the trees are seen, rather than some awesome background landscape. The quick cuts in editing also make the scene crackle with kinetic energy. The cinematography of Ichio Yamazaki is filled with details, yet the clarity is amazing — especially at night, when there is an almost tactile depth to the grays on blacks. The score by Masaru Sato is full of throbbing percussion, yet it also has comic lilts to it — a nod to Kurosawa's Western influence — whenever the fools are about to get into trouble. There is also a small cameo role for Kurosawa's great early film star Takashi Shimura, as General Nagakura, the mentor to General Makabe.