Yojimbo Review

A scruffy ronin chooses his road by tossing a stick in the air, then walks into a town where a dog trots down the main street with a severed hand in its mouth. Toshiro Mifune's Sanjuro, who takes his name from the mulberry field outside the window, is the template Sergio Leone would copy for the Man with No Name, and Mifune plays him as a shrug with a sword, scratching while he calculates.

The town is a stage set, two gang headquarters facing each other across a windblown street with Eijiro Tono's tavern keeper in the middle, and Kazuo Miyagawa's camera turns the gangsters into clownish, cowardly crowds. Masaru Sato's brassy, off-kilter score works as commentary rather than decoration. Tatsuya Nakadai's Unosuke, swaggering with a revolver in a world of swords, is the one opponent who matters, and the final showdown has the brevity of a punchline.

Leone remade it without permission as A Fistful of Dollars, and Toho sued. Mifune won the best actor prize at Venice, and Pauline Kael called the film a farce of force. It lacks the depth of Seven Samurai, and a subplot about a captive wife is the one place it reaches for pathos and strains. As a black comedy about violence as a business, Kurosawa never made anything more enjoyable.