Akira Kurosawa

) This success in turn led to a vogue in America for Japanese movies throughout the 1950s replacing the enthusiasm for Italian neorealist cinema. Kurosawa had meanwhile instructed Toho to purchase the film rights to King's Ransom a novel about a kidnapping written by American author and screenwriter Evan Hunter under his pseudonym of Ed McBain as one of his 87th Precinct series of crime books. Despite now risking his own money Kurosawa chose a story more directly critical of the Japanese business and political elites than any of his previous works.

After the mid-1960s he became much less prolific but his later work—including his final two epics Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985)—continued to win awards including the Palme d'Or for Kagemusha though more often abroad than in Japan. k. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter he made his debut as a director in 1943 during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata (a.