SOURCE: "Kurosawa Brought Japan—and Inspiration—to West," in Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1998, pp. Al, All.

[In the following obituary, Thomas praises the achievements of Kurosawa's career.]

At the time of his death Sunday of a stroke at his Tokyo home, Akira Kurosawa, who was 88, was widely regarded as the greatest director still living and one of the most influential filmmakers of any era.

His 1950 Rashomon, a period tale in which a bandit's assault on an aristocratic woman traveling through a forest is told from four different viewpoints, is one of the key films in the history of Japanese cinema and spawned many imitators. When it took the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. Japanese films were virtually unknown in the West, but it went on to win a special Oscar as the best foreign film of the year. A Hong Kong broadcast today declared that...