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Criticism

Kenji Mizoguchi, the acclaimed director of Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), was eleven years Kurosawa's senior. After the mid-1950s, some critics of the French New Wave began to favor Mizoguchi over Kurosawa. New Wave critic and film-maker Jacques Rivette, in particular, thought Mizoguchi to be the only Japanese director whose work was at once entirely Japanese and truly universal; Kurosawa, by contrast, was thought to be more influenced by Western cinema and culture, a view that has been disputed.

In Japan, some critics and filmmakers considered Kurosawa to be elitist. They viewed him to center his effort and attention on exceptional or heroic characters. In her DVD commentary on Seven Samurai, Joan Mellen argued that certain shots of the samurai characters Kambei and Kyuzo, which show Kurosawa to have accorded higher status or validity to them, constitutes evidence for this point of view. These Japanese critics argued that Kurosawa was not sufficiently progressive because the peasants were unable to find leaders from within their ranks. In an interview with Mellen, Kurosawa defended himself, saying,

I wanted to say that after everything the peasants were the stronger, closely clinging to the earth... It was the samurai who were weak because they were being blown by the winds of time.

From the early 1950s, Kurosawa was also charged with catering to Western tastes due to his popularity in Europe and America. In the 1970s, the politically engaged, left-wing director Nagisa Ōshima, who was noted for his critical reaction to Kurosawa's work, accused Kurosawa of pandering to Western beliefs and ideologies. Author Audie Block, however, assessed Kurosawa to have never played up to a non-Japanese viewing public and to have denounced those directors who did.