Among the more specific influences that guided Lucas as
he made the Star Wars trilogy, one of the most
important was the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa’s classic
samurai movies, such as The Seven Samurai (1954)
and Yojimbo (1961), often feature members of the
warrior class of samurai who try to live their lives according to
the honorable code of bushido, the way of the warrior. The
samurai of The Seven Samurai, for example, are
very like Jedi Knights in that they are a separate caste devoted
to justice and to protecting others. Obi-Wan’s robes (not to mention
his Japanese-sounding name) seem to suggest those of the poor samurai
of Kurosawa’s films, just as the Jedi’s two-handed lightsabers seem
like a sci-fi version of the samurai’s katana.
Kurosawa’s influence on Star Wars is
even more specific than that, however. Lucas has said in the past
that the inspiration for the characters of C-3PO, R2-D2, Han Solo,
and Princess Leia could be found in Kurosawa’s The Hidden
Fortress (1958), in which two bumbling friends help a roguish
hero rescue a brave princess from captivity. More specific still,
Lucas includes a direct homage to Kurosawa in the scene in which
Ben defends Luke in the Mos Eisley cantina. The shot of the ruffian’s
arm on the floor, severed by Ben’s blade, is a reference to a similarly
severed arm, filmed in the same way, in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
Another direct influence on Lucas, above and beyond the
influence of the genre itself, was John Ford’s classic western, The
Searchers (1956).The scene in which Luke
approaches the burned-out farm and finds his aunt and uncle murdered
is shot in such a way that it echoes a similar scene in Ford’s film,
in which the young hero also returns to his family’s farm to find
the buildings burned and his aunt and uncle murdered. Like Luke,
the hero of The Searchers is drawn into a relationship
with a relentless father figure, bent on evil. And like Darth Vader,
the father figure in The Searchers, played unforgettably
by John Wayne, experiences a last-second moral regeneration. Like
the Star Wars trilogy, The Searchers is
essentially a quest story, one in which the son must ultimately
redeem the father, and it also approaches the grandeur of myth.
