By the time he made Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa was 70 and considered a has-been, with the glory days of such 1950s classics as Rashomon and Seven Samurai long behind him. He almost didn’t finish the film because he ran out of money; American Kurosawa fans Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas had to persuade 20th Century Fox to front him the rest, in return for international distribution rights.
But the result was a grand, colorful tragicomic epic (about a thief who impersonates a medieval warlord so that his clan’s enemies won’t know that the leader has died), one the likes of which Japan had scarcely produced since Kurosawa’s heyday. Kagemusha shared the Palme d’Or with Bob Fosse’s coruscating autobiographical musical All That Jazz. It marked a comeback for Kurosawa, who went on to make four more films, including the epic King Lear adaptation Ran (1985), the masterpiece of his late career.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlcLQho9MpI]