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Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945) [The Criterion Collection]

Posted By: Someonelse
SD / DVD
Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945) [The Criterion Collection]

Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945)
Sanshiro Sugata / The Most Beautiful / Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two / The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail
4xDVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | 305 min | 15,96 Gb
Audio: Japanese (日本語) AC3 1.0 @ 384 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Action, Adventure, Drama | The Criterion Collection

Years before Akira Kurosawa changed the face of cinema with such iconic works as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo, he made his start in the Japanese film industry with four popular and exceptional works, created as World War II raged. All gripping dramas, those rare first films - Sanshiro Sugata; The Most Beautiful; Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two; and The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail - are collected here and include a two-part martial arts saga, a portrait of female volunteers helping the war effort, and a kabuki-derived tale of deception. These captivating films are a glorious introduction to a peerless career.


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Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945) [The Criterion Collection]

Sanshiro Sugata (1943)
DVD5 | 1.33:1 | Japanese with English subtitles | 01:19:08 | 4,14 Gb

Kurosawa’s effortless debut is based on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita about the rivalry between judo and jujitsu. Starring Susumu Fujita as the title character, Sanshiro Sugata is a thrilling martial arts action tale, but it’s also a moving story of moral education that’s quintessential Kurosawa.


Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945) [The Criterion Collection]

Special Features: None
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Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945) [The Criterion Collection]

The Most Beautiful (1944)
DVD5 | 1.33:1 | Japanese with English subtitles | 01:25:31 | 4,13 Gb

This portrait of female volunteer workers at an optics plant during World War II, shot on location at the Nippon Kogaku factory, was created with a patriotic agenda. Yet thanks to Akira Kurosawa’s groundbreaking semidocumentary approach, The Most Beautiful is a revealing look at Japanese women of the era and anticipates the aesthetics of Japanese cinema’s postwar social realism.


Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945) [The Criterion Collection]

Special Features: None
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-


Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945) [The Criterion Collection]

Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two (1945)
DVD5 | 1.33:1 | Japanese with English subtitles | 01:22:12 | 4,17 Gb

Kurosawa’s first film was such a success that the studio leaned on the director to make a sequel. The result is a hugely entertaining adventure, reuniting most of the major players from the original and featuring a two-part narrative in which Sanshiro first fights a pair of Americans and then finds himself the target of a revenge mission undertaken by the brothers of the original film’s villain.


Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945) [The Criterion Collection]

Special Features: None
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-


Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945) [The Criterion Collection]

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945)
DVD5 | 1.33:1 | Japanese with English subtitles | 00:59:28 | 3,52 Gb

The fourth film from Akira Kurosawa is based on a legendary twelfth-century incident in which the lord Yoshitsune and a group of samurai retainers dressed as monks in order to pass through a dangerous enemy checkpoint. The story was dramatized for centuries in Noh and kabuki theater, and here it becomes one of the director’s most riveting early films.


Eclipse Series 23: The First Films of Akira Kurosawa (1943-1945) [The Criterion Collection]

Special Features: None
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-

"The First Four Films of Akira Kurosawa" provide evidence of a director who had thorough control of his chosen medium from the get go. The literal patriotic drumbeating of "The Most Beautiful" (which starts with a caption imploring viewers to "Attack and Destroy the Enemy") can be a bit difficult to swallow today, but the movies in this set are much more than a curiosity only for the Kurosawa completist. The two "Sanshiro" films are lean actioners with a poetic sensibility that makes them difficult to dismiss as "mere" entertainment and "The Men Who Tread On The Tiger's Tale" is a quiet, lush example of filmed theater with a fine lead performance by Denjiro Ookouchi.
Many Thanks to Original uploader.