Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island

A disillusioned Musashi Miyamoto (Toshiro Mifune) has turned his back on the samurai life, becoming a farmer in a remote village, while his nemesis Kojiro (Koji Tsuruta) now works for the shogun. Circumstances bring them back together for one final face-off. Though it’s marked by a memorably intense final battle sequence, the rousing conclusion to the Samurai Trilogy is engaged with matters of the heart as well, as Miyamoto must ask himself what it is that makes a warrior and a man.

Japan
1956
104 minutes
Color
1.33:1
Japanese
Spine #16

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The Samurai Trilogy

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Cast & Credits

Cast

Toshiro Mifune: Musashi Miyamoto
Koji Tsuruta: Kojiro Sasaki
Kaoru Yachigusa: Otsu
Mariko Okada: Akemi
Michiko Saga: Omitsu
Takashi Shimura: Court official Sado Nagaoka
Minoru Chiaki: Sasuke
Daisuke Kato: Toji Gion
Haruo Tanaka: Kumagoro
Kichijiro Ueda: Priest Ogon
Kokuten Kodo: Priest Nikkan

Credits

Director: Hiroshi Inagaki
Producer: Kazuo Takimura
Screenplay: Tokuhei Wakao
Screenplay: Hiroshi Inagaki
From Hideji Hojo's adaptation of Musashi, by: Eiji Yoshikawa
Art direction: Hiroshi Ueda
Art direction: Kisaku Ito
Lighting: Tsuruzo Nishikawa
Sound: Masanobu Miyazaki
Music: Ikuma Dan

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Explore

Toshiro Mifune

Actor

Akira Kurosawa once said, “The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression. Toshiro Mifune needed only three feet.” The filmmaker certainly gave Mifune a lot of space, however: over the course of sixteen collaborations, the actor and the director created some of the most dynamic characters ever put on-screen, all marked by an intense physicality and a surprising tenderness. Kurosawa first took note of the handsome actor when Mifune was twenty-seven, during an open audition at Toho Studios; he was soon cast in Snow Trail (1947), a film Kurosawa wrote for director Senkichi Taniguchi. Just one year later, Kurosawa gave him the lead in Drunken Angel as a consumptive gangster. Mifune proceeded to inhabit a variety of deeply felt roles for Kurosawa, including an artist hounded by paparazzi (Scandal); a bandit who may or not be a rapist and murderer (Rashomon); a loose cannon ronin who reluctantly protects a village (Seven Samurai); an elderly patriarch terrified of a second nuclear attack (I Live in Fear); and, probably most iconically, the wily, shiftless samurai Yojimbo. Mifune is known for more than his work with Kurosawa; see him in Hiroshi Inagaki’s Oscar-winning Samurai Trilogy and Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion. But it is Kurosawa’s greatest films that are most unimaginable without Mifune’s bravado streaking across them like lightning. The pair parted ways professionally in 1965.