Samurai movies and other such films that feature gruff, overbearing figures are sometimes seen as mere caricatures of a culture that was in many ways one of those brutal and savage when one stepped outside of the courtly behavior that they were so well known form. Toshiro Mifune however brought something else to samurai movies that was both impressive and extremely aggressive. The honest truth is that he didn’t start out as one of the greatest movie characters to ever grace the screen. Instead he was a photographer’s assistant for a while before he was entered into a talent search by his friends without his knowledge and ended up winning a spot in the final selections. During the next talent search he didn’t manage to get selected by the director he’d come to impress, but he did manage to catch the attention of noted filmmaker Akiro Kurosawa, who decided that Toshiro was just the kind of person he needed.
From there it was a wild ride for a number of years.
He did away with the image of the clean-cut samurai with his characters.
Mifune was not the kind of samurai that, in many movies, is seen as proper, well-mannered, and well-polished. He didn’t always duel as samurai are seen doing many films. He was the type that would growl, be exceedingly rude, and very abrasive when he needed to be but also have a point to what he was doing and would cling to some moral background. But as far as fighting went he wasn’t always the guy that would sit there and duel with the enemy, he would come running and mow them down without mercy, much unlike several movies featuring the legendary samurai. This was a guy that had one failing according to Kurosawa, and that was his gruff demeanor that was hard if not impossible to soften completely.
Mifune and Kurosawa eventually parted ways.
After the film Red Beard the two men had a falling out which was in a big part over the movie. Mifune had to grow out his beard and couldn’t cut it since Kurosawa needed it for the role he was creating. Unfortunately this meant that Mifune couldn’t do a whole lot else when it came to acting unless it was allowed to incorporate the beard he wasn’t supposed to get rid of. The downside of this is that it affected his ability to do much of anything else for so long that it started to cost him more than it was worth, and this allowed a bitter resentment to grow between Mifune and Kurosawa. Even more unfortunate was that after Red Beard each man began to see varying levels of success. While Mifune’s career started to increase as his popularity went through the roof, Kurosawa’s films began to dwindle and his reputation started to suffer. Kurosawa even went on record when Mifune did the Shogun series to say that his former friend’s performance was less than admirable. At this point however Mifune was doing so well that he was eventually approached by none other than George Lucas to play the role of either Darth Vader or Obi-Wan Kenobi. He turned them both down though.
The two friends did eventually reconcile.
Despite remaining apart from one another for nearly three decades, Mifune and Kurosawa did manage to reconcile when they saw each other at the funeral of their old friend Ishiro Honda. It was a tense moment at first, but they embraced shortly after, finally ending the ambivalence between them after so long. They never reconnected after that however since both men died within a year of each other. It was in 1992 that Mifune began to experience serious health problems, perhaps from overworking himself or another factor. It’s unknown what it really was that affected his health back then, but by 1997 he passed away from multiple organ failure. It’s said that both men valued the time they had with one another, but the grudge they held for so long kept them apart like nothing else could, insuring that they would spend a long time pondering just what had went wrong and what they could have done to prevent it. In the end however it seems that they finally made peace, if only because they had come to realize how futile it was to be at odds for so long.
Toshiro Mifune was one of the best of his time, and he was one of the absolute best in a time when special effects hadn’t yet become what they are today. He had to act more than anything, and he had to make it look and sound convincing in a way that made people not mind that it didn’t always look real. That’s called real showmanship, and that’s what makes a star.
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