Not just a black-and-white, subtitled Star Wars!

You may or may not have heard that George Lucas drew on Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress as his primary inspiration for Star Wars, but despite a few noteworthy similarities, Star Wars is a substantial departure from this movie. If you're expecting a black-and-white, subtitled rehash of the science fiction blockbuster, you're going to be surprised, though (I should hope!) not disappointed.

Two bickering peasants stagger across a barren plain, having escaped a prison camp where they were forced to dig the graves of comrades slain in battle. They'd gone to war as fortune seekers, but their side lost, so now they're destitute vagabonds in a land occupied by hostile troops, desperately hoping to make their way to a friendlier land. Scraping together wood for a fire, they discover a slender bar of gold hidden in a branch. Figuring there's more where that came from, they race off in search of the rest of the stash. Instead they discover a secret fortress tucked into a ravine -- and a large, gruff soldier who claims to have established possession of the cache of gold himself. But he's impressed by the peasants' plan for escaping to safety, so he takes them on as retainers, keeping them motivated by appealing to their seemingly boundless greed. Only later do they discover that the soldier is actually a great general and that his mission is to lead the defeated country's princess to safety.

The Hidden Fortress showcases Kurosawa's effortless genius at pacing, not to mention the acting talents of Toshiro Mifune (a star of several Kurosawa films, including Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Sanjuro) as the general. But perhaps the most magnificent scene in the movie is a duel that deserves a line on the list of the greatest movie duels of all time. Unlike your typical duel, fought with swords or pistols, this one is fought with 12-foot lances. It's a slow, balletic dance punctuated with flurries of thrusting and slashing, a masterwork of fight choreography.

As for the Star Wars connections: The droids R2D2 and C3P0 were inspired by the two peasants, Han Solo was (very loosely) based on the general, and the princess-rescue plot was copped outright, along with Princess Leia's tendency to show more moxie than her would-be rescuers. An early scene with the peasants trudging off across the wastes in opposite directions -- straight into the hands of captors -- was lifted almost outright, and the roughly triangular helmets of Japanese warriors became the roughly triangular helmets of Princess Leia's guards. That's about it, so don't worry that having seen Star Wars will leave you bored by The Hidden Fortress. They're as different as Congo the movie and Congo the book. :-)