Later, she frees a female slave from her master, and in return the grateful woman protects the princess from the peasants’ unwanted advances. Lucas has said that Leia is “more of a stand-and-fight kind of princess” than Kurosawa’s heroine, but it’s hardly a fair assessment, given that Uki does actually stand and fight: when Tahei and Mataschichi first spy her in a forest, she whips them with a stick. Of course, Lucas’s many innovations are what make Star Wars so magical – but in one respect the 1958 film seems more modern than the 1977 one, and that’s in its emphasis on Princess Uki. Besides, can it really be a coincidence that at the end of The Hidden Fortress, the heroes are saved by a facially scarred villain who has a last-minute change of allegiance, much like Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi? And if you’ve ever been bemused by the utter pointlessness of Queen Amidala disguising herself as her handmaid in The Phantom Menace, you can trace her subterfuge back to Princess Uki pretending to be a mute commoner so that she can travel undetected through enemy territory. Lucas even considered Mifune for the role of Ben Kenobi, who had formerly been a general himself during the Clone Wars. And for another, it showed how a civil war might look to a duo of bumbling, bickering nobodies. For one thing, it had an unusual blend of swashbuckling action and knockabout comedy, fairy-tale archetypes and war-movie grit. But it was Kurosawa’s widescreen epic The Hidden Fortress that fascinated Lucas.

Yojimbo (1961) became Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The Seven Samurai (1954) became John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960). Some international directors didn’t just learn from Kurosawa’s deep-focus vistas and propulsive editing, they remade his films wholesale. “Let me say it simply,” summed up Scorsese in 2009. Here was a writer-director from an intriguing foreign culture, but because he was so influenced by John Ford and other American directors, his films were accessible to Western audiences.

The New Hollywood wunderkinds – Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg – were entranced by his artistic, philosophical, yet dynamic work. Kurosawa was already a big name in Japanese cinema when he caught the world’s attention with Rashomon, an intricate crime drama which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.

Star Wars by Christopher Nicholas