In 1950, director, Akira Kurosawa directed a movie called Rashômon. The film has been named as Kurosawa's masterpiece film. The movie's theme is the impossibility of gaining the truth about an event from different witness accounts. Rashômon has been accredited as introducing Kurosawa and Japanese to Western audiences. The film starred Toshiro Mifune as Tojomaru, Machiko Kyo as Masako, Masayuki Mori as Takehiro, and Takashi Shimura as the woodcutter. Kurosawa's film has been very influential on many American films; however, in Japan it was considered a failure.
Rashômon takes place in ancient Japan. The film is about a samurai and his wife, who are attacked by an infamous bandit (Tajomuru), and the samurai ends up dead. Shortly afterward the samurai's death, Tajomuru is captured and goes to trial. However, Tajomuru's story and the samurai's wife's story are completely different. So, the court brings in a psychic in order to contact the murdered samurai, and have him give his own side of the story. The samurai's story once again is completely different from the first two accounts that were told. Finally, a the woodcutter that found the samurai's dead body is brought to trial to tell his account of what happened, and yet reveals another different version of what happened.
Kurosawa's film has been very influential among many movies and television series in America, for example, Courage Under Fire, Hoodwinked, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and CSI. In 1964 Paul Newman, Claire Bloom and Edward G. Robinson starred in a remake of the Japanese film. Also, Hero has been compared to Rashômon.
In 1951, at the Venice Film Festival, the foreign film won a Golden Lion Award. However, in Japan, critics have noted that the film was a failure "for visualizing the style of the original stories," "too complicated," "too monotonous," and contained "too much cursing." Japanese critics had a hard time understanding why Western audiences held the film as so highly credited.
In conclusion, Rashômon was highly acclaimed in Western societies. However, its own Japanese culture believed the film was not entertaining.