- The Hidden Fortress was Akira Kurosawa’s first hit after 1954’s Seven Samurai, four years and four films earlier. It won even bigger at the box office and scooped up a handful of Japanese and international awards, proving that its director was not merely an art-house auteur but could fill theaters as well. The film’s popularity in Japan was instrumental in securing financial guarantees for Kurosawa’s own production company, which supported all his subsequent films up to 1970. The pacing and characters of The Hidden Fortress, its landscapes and epic feel, make it a great action film, and as Kurosawa’s first use of widescreen, it is one of his most stylish movies. With this film, the director’s artistry and humanist ideology spectacularly fused with the entertainment values of adventure films and comedies.
- Beta Doradus (stars.astro.illinois.edu)
BETA DOR (Beta Doradus). Among the most important of all stars are the Cepheid variables, named after the prototype, Delta Cephei. Many of them dot the naked- eye starry sky, their number including Eta Aquilae, Zeta Geminorum (Mekbuda), even Polaris, the brightest of them (though Polaris’s variations are too small to be witnessed by eye). Here is another bright one, fourth magnitude (averaging 3.76) Beta Doradus, the second brightest star (after Alpha) in the modern southern constellation Dorado, the Swordfish.