Toshiro Mifune
portrays a Samurai who finds himself in the middle of a feud-torn
Japanese village. Neither side is particularly honorable, but Mifune is
hungry and impoverished, so he agrees to work as bodyguard (or Yojimbo)
for a silk merchant (Kamatari Fujiwara) against a sake merchant (Takashi Shimura).
He then pretends to go to work for the other, the better to let the
enemies tear each other apart. Imprisoned for his "treachery," he
escapes just in time to watch the two warring sides wipe each other out.
This was his plan all along, and now that peace has been restored, he
leaves the village for further exploits. Yes, Yojimbo was the prototype
for the Clint Eastwood "Man with No Name" picture A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The difference is that Fistful relies on Eastwood for its success, whereas Yojimbo scores on every creative level, from director Akira Kurosawa to cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa to Mifune's classic lead performance. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Yojimbo is both a brilliant reworking of the samurai genre and arguably director Akira Kurosawa's most influential work. Toshiro Mifune gives the finest performance of his stellar career as Sanjuro, a bored, flea-bitten, and thoroughly amoral ronin
who possesses almost superhuman swordmanship. Like a Greek god
descending from Mount Olympus, Sanjuro comes upon a village torn asunder
by two rival groups and cleans up the town. Like Gary Cooper in High Noon
(1952), Sanjuro finds himself in a village full of greedy, weak, and
bad people that probably does not deserve saving. Unlike Cooper, whose
face grows grim with the moral importance of his act, Sanjuro smirks
with anarchic glee as he deftly picks one side against the other. With a
wry, subversive wit, Kurosawa marries his muscular narrative to a
swaggering visual style, aided by the masterful cinematography of Kazuo Miyagawa. From the Sanjuro's final duel with young gun-toting thug Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai)
to the single grotesque image of a dog clutching a human hand at the
film's outset, Yojimbo crackles with a dynamic energy that rivets and
entertains. Though Yojimbo spun off a number of remakes, including Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Walter Hill's Last Man Standing (1996), none matches the film's technical brilliance and dark humor. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
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