Samurai Trilogy
1954 Japanese film
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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.
Hiroshi Inagaki
Tokuhei Wakao
Eiji Yoshikawa (novel)
| The Samurai Trilogy | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Hiroshi Inagaki |
| Written by | Hideji Hōjō (play) Hiroshi Inagaki Tokuhei Wakao Eiji Yoshikawa (novel) |
| Produced by | Kazuo Takimura |
| Starring | Toshiro Mifune Kaoru Yachigusa Rentarō Mikuni |
| Music by | Ikuma Dan |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Toho Studios |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 303 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
The three films are:
- Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1954)
- Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1955)
- Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956)
Together, they form a trilogy that follows the development of Musashi from a young soldier to a more reflective 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 review almost 60 years after the release of the trilogy, the late academic and film critic Stephen Prince noted "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.
