Clint Eastwood, an icon of American heroism recognized throughout the world, made a movie last year about one of the best-known battles of World War II, a movie that lacked both a hero and so much as a glance in the direction of what was being fought over. It was a movie about war seen only through the eyes of its victims. Flags of Our Fathers was no anomaly, but a sign of our cultural times and one that has been a long time in coming. Its victim-heroes have become almost as much of a cliché as the idea that only primitive and uneducated people think in terms of wrong and right, black and white, bad guys and good guys.

How did this change occur? Most of humankind through most of history has happily lived in a black-and-white, good-and-evil world. Why, in the last 50 years or so, has the aesthetic appeal of such a vision faded? Who taught us the charm and sophistication of gray?

Here’s one candidate: the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998). Of course, he had his precursors. What the French call film noir, for instance, ought properly to be called film gris, since it is founded on the principle of moral ambiguity. There are no heroes, only little men trying to stay alive and out of the way of the thugs who are what heroes, robbed of honor and chivalry and the heroic ethos, have become. All the little men can do is shake a fist of defiance in the face of the God or fate or the economic system that has kept them down.

But the noir style hasn’t aged well. It still belongs very much to its time and place in mid-20th-century America—as such recent feeble attempts to revive it as Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia and Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland remind us. The man who took the essence of film noir and turned it into a style that could be effectively transmitted across national borders and to succeeding generations had two important qualifications for the job besides his genius: he started out as a painter and took the point of view of a defeated culture.

It’s no surprise that heroic war movies such as those that continued being made in Hollywood for another quarter century stopped dead in Japan in 1945, when, at age 35, Kurosawa was making his second film as director. Already, the assurance and visual richness of his style prefigured that he would do in film what the European and American modernists were doing in painting—make the artist the hero of his work.

No longer was artistry meant to be kept out of sight and in the service of its subject. Now, the subject was reduced to an excuse for the artistry. Watching a Kurosawa film is a fatiguing process because there is always so much going on, so many ways the artist has of calling attention to his artistry—which always exists on a plane superior to even the most exciting of the stories he has to tell.

In addition, Kurosawa always adapts his stories to suit his method by giving the pride of place in them to the outsider, the observer of the action. His distinctive style is to insert the outsider—this detached figure who is a stand-in for the filmmaker himself and who provides the gray in a black-and-white world—in the middle of the story.

Kurosawa's moral world is always like that of the cursed town in 'Yojimbo,' with two equally unpalatable enemies killing each other and humanity somewhere in between trying to survive and, where possible, perform a single act of kindness.

This perspective is apparent in Stray Dog (1949), in which a criminal and the detective pursuing him become, in true noir fashion, something close to moral equivalents—as do the revenge-seeker and his victim in The Bad Sleep Well (1960), Kurosawa’s take on Hamlet.

The Olympian detachment of the filmmaker from the point of view of his characters was the fundamental organizing principle of Rashômon (1950), the movie that first brought Kurosawa to the attention of an international audience. There, the same story (of a rape and murder in 12th-century Japan) is told from multiple points of view as a way of illustrating the importance of the observer’s situation—and of the essential Kurosawan datum that there is no “true” or “real” story independent of one’s point of view. The brilliance of his filmmaking and its endless geometrical variation, like a kaleidoscope, reflect the point he has to make—that the storyteller is the hero of his own story.

Though skeptical of heroes, Kurosawa always aspired to work on the heroic scale, and he got his chance in 1954 with Seven Samurai. He took as his subject an obvious tale of bad guys (bandits preying on peasant villages) and good guys (a ragtag band of selfless warriors)—which it largely remained in The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960), the American remake—but he drew back from it to create his characteristic Kurosawan perspective.

He achieved the effect partly through extraordinarily subtle camera work, which shifted between telephoto close-ups and deep-focus pans and always managed to pick out of scenes of frenzied action the significant detail. As usual, the prominence Kurosawa gives to the intelligent observer has as its dramatic analogue the outsider in the midst of the action. In this film, the role of outsider goes to the bumptious ex-farmer and would-be samurai Kikuchiyo, played by the greatest of all Kurosawa’s stars and collaborators, Toshirô Mifune.

The most memorable moment in a three-and-a-half-hour film full of memorable moments comes as a mother, one of the bandits’ victims, hands her child to tough-guy Kikuchiyo as she dies, and suddenly he breaks down in tears. “The same thing happened to me,” he says. “I was like this baby.”

The samurai chase the bandits from the village, and the fact that life then continues normally is meant to be seen as being as much a defeat for the samurai as for the bandits whom they so uncomfortably resemble. As they stand watching the villagers’ ceremonial rice-planting at the end, Shichiroji (Daisuke Katô), one of three samurai still alive after the fighting, says: “I can’t believe we survived again.” The wise samurai leader, Kambei (Takashi Shimura), replies that they are also defeated again: “The farmers have won. We have lost.”

Kurosawa refuses to allow the samurai—or the viewers—a moment of satisfaction in their successful defense of the helpless villagers. They were only doing what they were professionally trained to do, which is not significantly different from what the bandits were doing. There’s no nobility among the peasants, either. They are cunning and treacherous, even murderous when given the opportunity. But at least they represent life and hope and possibility.

Even as Seven Samurai was being remade as The Magnificent Seven, Kurosawa was already at work on the film that would be even more influential in shaping the American movie hero that would succeed the still-chivalrous John Waynes and Gary Coopers who reigned supreme in the 1940s and 1950s. That film, Yojimbo (1961), had its biggest influence on Hollywood indirectly, through Sergio Leone’s remake of 1964, A Fistful of Dollars, and its sequels, including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), starring Eastwood in the role Mifune played in Yojimbo: a warrior for hire, selling his skills to the highest bidder in the midst of a gang war.

Kurosawa’s original was superior to Leone’s imitation, but in Clint Eastwood the latter found the sort of charismatic figure who could stand comparison with Toshirô Mifune. Both heroes were meant to be seen as morally compromised characters who, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, emerge as heroes only because of a single act of chivalry or idealism that stands out prominently against the background of moral desolation that each inhabits.

Kurosawa’s Mifune and Leone’s Eastwood were among the first cool heroes, self-contained like the ronin (independent samurai) or, in American movies, the private eye. Kurosawa’s cool heroes owe a lot to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, who also operated against a background of vice, violence, and treachery, but somehow managed to stand just enough apart from it to retain a solitary, quixotic kind of heroism.

These were heroes who didn’t look heroic. They weren’t better than other men—apart, perhaps, from being a little quicker on the draw or more effective with the samurai blade. They certified their common humanity even as they stood apart from the particularly contemptible version of it they saw around them. It’s no surprise, then, that Kurosawa kept coming back to the period of the breakdown of central authority and of warlord rule in 16th-century Japan for the settings of his films—both the black-and-white samurai movies and the later Technicolor epics, Kagemusha (1980), which was coproduced by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, and Ran (1985).

Against the background of visual splendor provided by the sumptuous sets and the color-contrasted armies in these later films, made when Kurosawa was in his seventies, the little man who acts as observer, victim, and commentator—the peasant double (Tatsuya Nakadai) in Kagemusha or the jester (Peter) in Ran—stands out all the more prominently. He’s part of the characteristic Kurosawan triangle.

In Seven Samurai, this triangle is formed by the peasants, the bandits, and the samurai, with Kikuchiyo—half-peasant, half-samurai—moving between two of the sides. In Yojimbo, the triangle is made up of the contentious Seibei and the Ushitora factions on two sides and Sanjuro, the lone samurai all on his own or with the tavern-keeper, Gonji (Eijirô Tono), moving between the two on the third.

In The Hidden Fortress (1958), later to be influential with Lucas in the creation of the first Star Wars movie, the perspective on the struggle of the forlorn remains of the Akizuki clan—the Princess Yuki (Misa Uehara) and her loyal General Rokurota Makabe (played by Mifune again)—to escape their persecutors of the Yamana clan is provided by the two comic grotesques, Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matakishi (Kamatari Fujiwara), ancestors of R2D2 and C3PO.

In Rashômon, there are two triangles: that of the priest, the commoner, and the woodsman as they tell the tale, and that of the bandit, the samurai, and the lady in the tale that is told in three (or four) different ways. Here, even more than in the later color epics, we can see how Kurosawa constantly re-echoes these triangular relationships in the composition of his shots, as if he felt it necessary constantly to remind us that we are not to allow ourselves the luxury of self-identification with one side or the other, as in the old heroic paradigm—but only with the detached and noncommittal third or “gray” option.

Even in Rhapsody in August (1991), a late film in which he meditates on the moral significance of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Kurosawa refuses to take sides. Like the old widow, perhaps, he is only prepared to say that war itself is responsible for so many tragic deaths—which is essentially what he is saying in the conclusion of Seven Samurai.

But this is really a denial of responsibility. Responsibility is also binary: either you’re innocent or guilty, a good guy or a bad guy. Instead, Kurosawa always insists on carving out the third option for himself through the triangulated position of the observer, the watcher—the painter that he started out to be or the filmmaker that he became—or the unreliable witness who was the figure at the heart of Rashômon.

This person doesn’t take any responsibility because there is no longer any responsibility to take. To Kurosawa, the truth is unknowable. It exists only in the versions of it that all of us make up to excuse and justify ourselves for the things that we do. Similarly, the moral world is always like that of the cursed town in Yojimbo, with two equally unpalatable enemies killing each other and humanity somewhere in between trying to survive and, where possible, perform a single act of kindness—like the woodsman’s adoption of the abandoned baby in Rashômon—that can redeem human nature.

It’s a compelling vision. So compelling that Hollywood has been completely captivated by it. And if it leaves no room for the old-fashioned hero, do we care? Perhaps not. At least until we once again stand in need of heroes.

James Bowman, who has been reviewing movies for almost 20 years, is the author of “Honor: A History” (Encounter). See his website, www.jamesbowman.net.

Image by Getty Images.