Mifune and Kurosawa gave the world, some of the best movies ever.
They did... although their work together is not
really the sample study people might think it is when they say something about Mifune providing "Samurai authenticity" since Mifune hardly ever played a samurai in all those Kurosawa movies.
Seven Samurai is among the greatest samurai movies and Mifune is one of the greatest actors in the ensemble, but his character is
*spoiler* not who he says he is. Then Yojimbo and its sequel, he's a wandering swordsman and assumed to be fallen samurai, but as far as I remember he never reveals his backstory; he is the original man with no name. In Rashomon, he's a thief; in Red Beard, he's a doctor; many of their other collabs were set in modern time. (BTW, the modern-day Kurosawas are
highly underrated!)
Unless I'm counting wrong, i can only think of two cases where Mifume did play a samurai for Kurosawa in their many teamups. One would be Throne of Blood (where we mostly see him as a king, but he gets the throne by killing his ruler early in this Hamlet takeoff,) and then in Hidden Fortress, he's a war commander escorting a princess.
Mifune did play a samurai in many Japanese films, no doubt. (Most notably, there's the Hiroshi Inagaki Samurai Trilogy, where he played Miyamoto Musashi; technically he is I believe a ronin across almost the entirety of the trilogy, but the movies are still all about his samurai code and calling.) However, he didn't really do it often in Kurosawa films, despite Kurosawa doing a lot of films in that period and them together doing what is probably the most famous samurai movie.
(*And not only was most of their samurai work done separate, but in many cases like Yojimbo or 7 Samurai, their work in this period was intentionally counter-commentary against the traditional heroic legends of noble and stalwart samurai. So that either makes them the wrong examples of samurai movies or the best examples of samurai movies, depending on your viewpoint.)
Just a little trivia to add to the discussion.