Yojimbo (1961)

It is a truly strange thing for a Samurai film to have all but invented a new genre of film: the Spaghetti Western.  It may be strange, but Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo was directly adapted into Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and star Toshiro Mifune's unnamed protagonist was the basis for Clint Eastwood's star-making character: the Man with No Name.  Released in 1961, Yojimbo was one of the sixteen collaborations between Kurosawa and Mifune (of which nearly every one is a classic).

The film opens with a ronin (Toshiro Mifune), or masterless samurai, walking along a dirt road in the Japanese countryside until he stumbles upon a quiet town.  He learns from a local restaurateur that the town has two crime lords currently at war; the ronin decides to become a bodyguard to one of them.  The man gives his name as Kuwabatake Sanjuro (or Mulberry Field thirty-year-old) and is hired after a demonstration of his unmatched prowess with the blade.  At alternate points he is hired out to both crime lords, maneuvering to have the bosses engage in battles that will rid the town of both of their gangs.  Eventually, when his work is done, he leaves the town as suddenly as he arrived, with the town free from crime once more.

Greatly influenced by American Western films, particularly those directed by John Ford, Yojimbo is much more "Western" than most Japanese films.  The setting of the film is undeniably influenced by the Western: a small dusty town riddled with crime.  The main differences are that the drink of choice is sake instead of whiskey, and the fights involve samurai swords, not revolvers.  Although Yojimbo is a homage to the Western genre, it has a significant element of parody; for example, Kurosawa totally disregards the morality presented in most Westerns.  Toshiro Mifune's unnamed hero is almost completely amoral and is one of cinema's prime examples of the anti-hero.

Toshiro Mifune, the most famous Japanese actor of his time, does some of his best work in the film playing the morally-ambiguous samurai that becomes nearly superhuman with a blade in his hand.  Mifune, a skilled dramatic actor, also has great comic timing that shines through the entire film.  His interactions with most of the characters are marked by their humor: from the restaurant owner who gives him free food to the crime lords bidding for his services.  The humor present throughout the film is what makes it a particularly special movie-going experience: it combines the virtues of the over-serious Westerns that were Yojimbo's primary inspirations with light parody.  The humor in the film comes in between moments of gritty realism: the first thing the protagonist sees when he walks into the town is a dog with a severed human hand in its mouth.

The film is an example of crowd-pleaser in its purest form; it has a lead with a sharp tongue and an even sharper sword, plenty of action sequences, villains you love to hate, and a lead with legitimate star-power.  Yojimbo is hardly Kurosawa's most important or greatest film, but it is enjoyable from start to finish and enormously influential.

8/10

Note: This review was previously posted on another blog I wrote.