Toshiro Mifune was the first Japanese — or, for that matter, Asian — actor to become an international action star. Born in 1920, he became one of the few Japanese known to foreign film fans, with the director who made him famous, Akira Kurosawa, being another.

But while the films Mifune made with Kurosawa in the 1950s and '60s defined his image for many — the untamed, impetuous warrior of "Shichinin no Samurai" ("Seven Samurai") or the scruffy, canny ronin (masterless samurai) of "Yojimbo" — he worked extensively with other directors at home and abroad. The results, such as Steven Spielberg's widely panned 1979 World War II comedy "1941" or the highly rated but culturally tone-deaf 1980 mini-series "Shogun," may not have revealed his best work, but they insinuated his name even deeper in the Western popular consciousness. When he died in 1997 at age 77 he had appeared in nearly 170 feature films.

So when Steven Okazaki's "Mifune: The Last Samurai" made its Japan premiere at the Kyoto International Film and Art Festival in October, my first question was why this sort of English-language feature documentary had been so long in coming.