Samurai Trilogy

The Samurai Trilogy is a film trilogy directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring Toshiro Mifune as Musashi Miyamoto and Kōji Tsuruta as Kojirō Sasaki. The films are based on Musashi, a novel by Eiji Yoshikawa about the famous duelist and author of The Book of Five Rings.

The Samurai Trilogy
Directed byHiroshi Inagaki
Produced byKazuo Takimura
Written byHideji Hōjō (play)
Hiroshi Inagaki
Tokuhei Wakao
Eiji Yoshikawa (novel)
StarringToshiro Mifune
Kaoru Yachigusa
Rentarō Mikuni
Music byIkuma Dan
Production
company
Distributed byToho Studios
Release date
1954–56
Running time
303 minutes
CountryJapan
LanguageJapanese

The three films are:

Together, they are a trilogy following the character growth of Musashi from brash—yet strong—young soldier to thoughtful and introspective samurai.

The choreography for the films was by Yoshio Sugino of the Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū.

Reception and influence

Samurai I won the 1955 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

In a contemporary review, film critic Stephen Prince noticed "the absence of gore" in the films: "Severed limbs and spurting arteries hadn’t yet arrived as a movie convention, and the fights in The Samurai Trilogy are relatively chaste, not showing the carnage that such duels would have actually resulted in."[1]

The trilogy became an influence for future films. In Kill Bill, for example, The Bride kills O-Ren Ishii with exactly the same swallow's tail move that Kojirō Sasaki uses, and the filming for this scene is almost identical as well, with the same parallel run, blood splash, and unknown victor until the faces are revealed. Bill himself references the ending to Samurai III when he suggests an "old school" duel on the beach at sunrise.

References
  1. Stephen Prince (June 26, 2012). "The Samurai Trilogy: Musashi Mifune". The Criterion Collection.


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