I finally got around to seeing this! Had heard of it for years of course - it's one of the very few movies whose title has become a noun, to mean contradictory accounts of the same story told by different people.
It's beautifully shot like all the other Kurosawa movies I've scene, full of striking compositions and intense acting from men, shell-shocked performances from the women (well, one woman).
It's quite a full on tale. The story concerns the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife by a bandit. The rape is never in doubt - even the bandit's version has him raping her. The bandit reckons he duelled honorably with the samurai - the wife says her husband killed himself. A woodcutter who saw it thinks the battle was all too nasty and ferocious (this fight scene - clumsy and all over the place and ending with the samurai begging for mercy and an exhausted bandit killing him - is one of the most believable on film). The samurai's ghost has a different version.
Sorry if this makes me seem like a philistine but the samurai's ghost feels like a cheat. And I wish the kid at the end of the film had been tied in with one of the other characters in the film in a stronger way.
But its powerful and the themes of "what is truth" interesting (although it is undercut because more weight feels given to the woodcutter's version of events). It looks fantastic and Toshiro Mifune is electric as the bandit.
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