Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto

Director: Hiroshi Inagaki
Year Released: 1954
Rating: 3.5

Part one of the Musashi Miyamoto trilogy could very well have been called The Taming of the Beast, as a Buddhist helps 'train' the wild warrior (played by the iconic Toshiro Mifune) by locking him in a room with books and keeping him from killing and being killed (at one point, an entire village chases after him). It's spirited and moves briskly - plus Mifune is, as you know, one hell of a charismatic lead - and as a whole this embodies the great masculine ideals of honor and courage and discipline. Dubbing it "the Japanese Gone with the Wind" is accurate because aside from being a lengthy story of a legend, it's also a male soap opera. Not that there's anything wrong with that....