10 Famous Movie Endings That Were Total Accidents

Akira Kurosawa's legendary samurai film Sanjuro offers up one of the director's most unforgettable endings, when the titular samurai (Toshiro Mifune) is forced to battle Hanbei (Tatsuya Nakadai) in a duel.

Yet what follows isn't a prolonged fight at all - both men draw their swords but Sanjuro beats Hanbei to it, fatally cutting him with one strike, causing a geyser of blood to squirt from his body before he drops down dead.

The scene's so awesome that it's impossible to conceive it was meant to go any other way, but according to actor Tatsuya Nakadai himself, the fight itself hadn't actually been planned out before shooting started - apart from the outcome, of course.

When Toshiro Mifune struck Nakadai on the first take and the technician triggered the blood pump strapped to Nakadai, it malfunctioned and shot a much larger torrent of fake blood out, almost knocking the actor over in the process.

Kurosawa decided he loved the effect, and so the fight was completed in a single "botched" take.