[The Hidden Fortress has an] air of wild cogent invention, of visual shock and of abrupt outrage. Grandiose, raw, implausible (yet conventional in a sense), [the film] recapitulates and enlarges, in more than "aspect-ratio" terms, virtually every feature of the so-called entertainment film, as we know it, from the Fairbanks genre to Treasure of the Sierra Madre, while incorporating stylistic vestiges of the older Soviet masters and from a host of samurai-films…. Kurasawa re-affirms his already manifest command of the witness point and of its collaborative art, editing…. (p. 270)

Kurasawa's modes of action are seemingly inexhaustible, his bravura editing tireless…. Better than anyone now working in film, perhaps, he knows when to hold his camera position and exploit wide-screen, not simply as a theater tableau but as a magnitude wherein movement is never absent and space is viable…. Throughout the action, mainly unified by the trek of four characters bearing gold concealed in bundles of firewood, Kurasawa's sense of the exact faltering gasp and shift of weight, the side-steps of momentum and recovery, is infallible. Which makes more astonishing the information that he once envied [Shiro] Toyoda for that director's physiological emphasis. All the evidence we have defines Kurasawa as perhaps the most physical director in the history of the movies!

This, alone, may be thought of as a drawback if we're expecting another multi-level masterpiece of the Rashomon order. In Seven Samurai (The Magnificent Seven), which I don't see as the outstanding achievement critical opinion would make it, the exclusively kinetic emphasis vitiated, or just replaced, an implied interior drama (relating to the hero) never conveyed. However, I'm prepared to acknowledge that I've overstated the force of such an implication—in this case. But not in Ikiru, where Kurasawa's rage for excess was a seriously distracting indulgence. (pp. 271-72)

As a morality of the proto-human utilized by a disciplined elite, the story [of The Hidden Fortress] is no doubt open to complaint from those who consider themselves too sophisticated for delight in such fables. I wonder if dissenters on these grounds are willing to ask themselves honestly if the latest capers of Elia Kazan, John Ford or Stanley Kramer are any more worldly or if, to take hats-in-the-air examples, A Place in the Sun or Look Back in Anger say anything more pregnant about man's management of his destiny?… The Hidden Fortress is definitive of its kind and not to be identified with the latest western or ben-hurern: it honors the flow of events and quietly predicates an ethic. (p. 272)

Kurasawa, no matter what he claims about wanting to be honored for making films of contemporary Japan, is inevitably attracted by the feudal setting, wherein social man was more broadly, essentially, ethnically differentiated. And it is just this regressive, if you like, purity of vision which sustains the dramatic tensions of his comedy. When the imperious Princess cries or the stoical Rokurota smiles or the bondsmen cooperate reasonably, an inhibition of impulses has been temporarily released, and the surprise engendered is a basic element—dramatic relief. (p. 274)

The impassive samurai or loyal retainer unmoved by the sex appeal of the bare-legged (here) Princess he is defending, is a staple of the Japanese period-film. As such, Kurasawa makes no attempt to disguise it. He intensifies it. At one juncture all hope for the fugitive seems lost, in which eventuality death before dishonor, for the Princess above all, is an imperative. Before preparing a final desperate strategy, Rokurota offers her the weapon with which she may have to destroy herself—in a resolute straight-arm gesture. As he does so, their eyes meet and his expression, in a single closeup, is as nakedly complete as any half-dozen reaction shots could ever be: a wordless suffusion of his face with the emotions he has until then suppressed, in which the whole meaning and mettle of the man is made explicit. The human soul has entered the landscape where before there was a type, less human than zoological…. [By] such touches—in this instance a momentarily piercing recognition of the nobility which crouches in the cage of the heart—Kurasawa restores to man the quality that individualizes him, and reaffirms the actual as a vital ingredient of the unbelievable. (pp. 274-75)