Check out this review of Mifune: The Last Samurai, a new documentary of the great Japanese actor, and then go check out the film itself. If you don't know who Toshiro Mifune was, you'll certainly want to. Just take a look at this wonderfully mad description:
Mifune was a one-man kamikaze burlesque show, as elegantly savage as his future inheritor Bruce Lee, as dextrous as Errol Flynn, as insanely comic as Curly from the Three Stooges, with a bombs-away ego all his own.
... He was a hurricane who blew away the landscape that had come before him. He was really the first samurai of action cinema, the one who cast his cross-cultural shadow over everything from the evolution of the martial-arts genre to Eastwood and Bronson.
I had just noted this new PBS documentary, but now that I've had a chance to watch it myself, I can't recommend it enough. It's fantastic! You can watch all of it online here. I just love how one historian flatly says about Prohibition, "What a stupid idea!" As for "MM Behind the Bar" for the duration of your viewing, she shall make you a dirty martini.
