Action-Packed Kurosawa in El Paso

This Saturday evening, moviegoers in El Paso, Texas, will have a chance to slip behind enemy lines with Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958), which is screening at the Alamo Drafthouse Montecillo as part of the theater’s monthly Film Salon screening and discussion series. Masterfully combining the samurai, western, and road-movie genres, Kurosawa’s classic tells the story of a disguised general (Toshiro Mifune) and princess (Misa Uehara) as they travel, along with two covetous peasants, through treacherous territory, a barren landscape under the control of a rival clan. With the popular Hidden Fortress—the director’s first hit following Seven Samurai (1954), and later a key influence on George Lucas’s Star Wars series—Kurosawa’s “artistry and humanist ideology spectacularly fused with the entertainment values of adventure films and comedies,” writes scholar Catherine Russell in her liner essay for our release of the film.