[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...