Although swords strike and blood flows, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo mostly registers as a comedy. Toshiro Mifune (a Kurosawa mainstay) plays Sanjuro, a clever jester of a samurai who plays two rival gangs against each other as they fight for control of a traumatized village. Sanjuro’s amused facial expressions—and exaggerated shoulder shake—belie the deadliness of the situation, while a series of buffoonish henchmen comically fail to call the samurai’s bluff. At the end of the day, Sanjuro proves to be a purifying moral force—though not necessarily because he operates according to his own moral code. The widescreen Tohoscope compositions offer ample opportunities for dramatically staged standoffs, yet Kurosawa also employs them for laughs. Consider the scene in which Sanjuro watches, from a bell tower, as the gangs square off on the village’s main street, each one feigning an attack and then falling back. In the same frame, we see a bemusedly smiling Sanjuro sitting in the tower and the gang below. As he turns to look down the other end of the street, we cut to a similar shot, except Sanjuro and the other gang have swapped sides of the screen. Heavily influenced by American Westerns of earlier decades—you can hear Hollywood motifs in Masaru Sato’s thrilling score, to which he’s added crucial Japanese drumming—Yojimbo itself was a likely model for 1964’s Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars (which was remade in 1996 by director Walter Hill and star Bruce Willis as Last Man Standing).
(5/6/2025)
