Thursday Minute
No. 60 | March 25, 2010

Kurosawa Centennial

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
Films of Akira Kurosawa

Featured this week
Monday         —   Rashomon (1950)
Tuesday         —   Ikiru (To Live) (1952)
Wednesday    —   Seven Samurai (1954)

Yojimbo (1961)

I’ll get paid for killing, and this town is full of people who deserve to die.

The story

Sanjuro is a vagrant ronin (mercenary samurai) who visits a small town in 19th-century Japan.  Competing crime lords battle for control of the town, and Sanjuro offers his services as a yojimbo (bodyguard) for the side that makes the better offer.  Through political jockeying and deft use of his sword—a lot of dead bodies later—Sanjuro brings peace to the town.  The film borrows from American westerns (and was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars) and also transposes plot elements from the Dashiell Hammett novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key.

Views & reaction

Pauline Kael:

Yojimbo is not a film that needs much critical analysis; its boisterous power and good spirits are right there on the surface.  Lechery, avarice, cowardice, animality, are rendered by fire; they become joy in life, in even the lowest forms of human life.  (Kurosawa’s grotesque variants of the John Ford stock company include a giant—a bit mentally retarded, perhaps.)  The whimpering, maimed and cringing are so vivid they seem joyful; what in life might be pathetic, loathsome, offensive is made comic and beautiful.  Kurosawa makes us accept even the most brutish of his creatures as more alive than the man who doesn’t yield to temptation.  There is so much displacement that we don’t have time or inclination to ask why we are enjoying the action; we respond kinesthetically.  It’s hard to believe that others don’t share this response.  Still, I should remember Bosley Crowther with his “the dramatic penetratioin is not deep, and the plot complications are many and hard to follow in Japanese.”  And John Macdonald, who writes, “It is a dark, neurotic, claustrophobic film…” and, “The Japanese have long been noted for their clever mimicry of the West.  Yojimbo in the cinematic equivalent of their ten-cent ball-point pens and their ninety-eight-cent mini-cameras.  But one expects more of Kurosawa.”

More?  Kurosawa, one of the few great new masters of the medium, has had one weakness:  he has often failed to find themes that were commensurate with the surge and energy of his images….  Now, in Yojimbo, Kurosawa has made a farce of force.  And now that he has done it, we can remember how good his comic scenes always were and that he frequently tended toward parody.

—KPFA broadcast, 1962 / Partisan Review, 1963; from For Keeps, 1994

James Berardinelli:

Yojimbo does not cause viewers to ponder deep issues in the way Rashomon does, nor does it possess the epic grandness of The Seven Samurai, yet it must still be considered in the top tier of Kurosawa’s films.  Stylish, compelling, and involving, it became as much a blueprint for future productions as it is an homage to past ones.  And, in Mifune’s Sanjuro, we have an unforgettable protagonist—a super-samurai who, by the sheer force of his presence, elevates this movie to a level of greatness.  Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name,” a character whose influence has stretched far and wide over the past four decades, is a direct descendent of Sanjuro.  It is fair to say that, without Yojimbo, certain key aspects of Western cinema would not be the same today.

—reelviews.net, 2002

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Yojimbo (1961)
Akira Kurosawa, director
Trailer

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Point of View
“The term giant is used too often to describe artists.  But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.”
—Martin Scorsese

…58…59…60.