AKA : Miyamoto Musashi | Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto | The Legend of Musashi | La légende de Musashi
Year : 1954
Country : Japan
Language : Japanese
Film Genre : Action | Adventure | Biography | Drama | History
Director/co-writer: Hiroshi Inagaki
Cast: Toshirô Mifune, Mariko Okada and Rentarô Mikuni

Plot: Released over a three-year period and garnering countless accolades, not the least of which being the eighth Best Foreign Film Oscar, the Samurai trilogy depicts the ascension of the legendary ronin Musashi Miyamoto, here played with his own inimitable fury (both inward and outward) by Toshirô Mifune, from confused but talented youth to master samurai. From a play by Hideji Hojo and from a novel (which predates the play) by Eiji Yoshikawa.
Takezo is a crazy mixed-up kid in a Japanese villiage in 1600. At the time, Japan was in the middle of a vicious civil war. Takezo convinces his friend Matahachi (Rentarô Mikuni) that they should seek their fortunes in war; Matahachi abandons Otsu, his fiancé, to do so. The two friends promptly end up on the losing side of the battle of Sekigahara, an abattoir in which 70,000 people were killed. But not our two heroes; they escape and are nursed back to health by a mother and her daughter. Their paths diverge when Oko, the mother, is rejected by Miyamoto and lies about it. The movie follows Takezo from here on; he tries to return home to tell Otsu that Matahachi is still alive, but after a run-in with some border guards, he is hunted down, captured, nearly executed, escapes, falls in love with Otsu, undergoes three years of spiritual training at the hands of Takuan, a Buddhist monk, adopts the name Miyamoto Musashi, abandons Otsu, and marches off into the sunset.
Musashi Miyamoto collapses the revolution in samurai status ushered in by the Tokugawa Shogunate with the reconfiguration of masculinity in the aftermath of WWII, opening with “a great battle between east and west” that associates the older, militaristic code with horizontality and immanence, and it’s imminent containment by etiquette, aesthetics and spirituality with verticality and transcendence.