Yojimbo
Japan, 1961
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenwriters: Akira Kurosawa, Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni
Genre: Chambara
Soundtrack composer: Masaru Satô
Editing: Akira Kurosawa
Production company: Tomoyuki Tanaka (producer)
Main actors:
Toshirō Mifune (Kuwabatake Sanjuro)
Tatsuya Nakadai (Unosuke)
Eijirō Tōno (Gonji)
Seizaburō Kawazu (Seibei)
Isuzu Yamada (Orin)
Daisuke Katō (Inokichi)
Takashi Shimura (Tokuemon)
Hiroshi Tachikawa (Yoichiro)
Yosuke Natsuki (Farmer’s son)
Kamatari Fujiwara (Tazaemon)
Ikio Sawamura (Hansuke)
Atsushi Watanabe (The cooper)
Yōko Tsukasa (Nui)
Yoshio Tsuchiya (Kohei)
Plot
In 1860, the Tokugawa shogunate is in the throes of a serious crisis. Many samurai have been left without a lord to serve, and wander throughout Japan offering their services to the highest bidder: they are the ronin. One of them is Sanjuro. The lone warrior arrives at a village, which has become the bloody scene of a dispute between two rival gangs: Ushi-Tora (“Cow-Tiger”) and Seibei. These clans have managed to corrupt local politicians and merchants. The undertaker is not short of work; he is always making new coffins.
Sanjuro witnesses the murky atmosphere of great danger that permeates the entire town. The good people do not dare to leave their homes for fear of criminals. The town used to be an important center for the silk trade, but since the yakuza have settled there, the most prosperous businesses are underground gambling and brothels. The two clans continually recruit thugs and fugitives. The murders do not stop. Sanjuro listens attentively to the desperate innkeeper, who explains all this to him, urging him to leave town as soon as possible after drinking his bowl of rice.
But Sanjuro has other plans: “I’m paid to kill, and this village is full of people who deserve to die”. Like the undertaker, the ronin sees a chance to take advantage of the situation – and to cleanse the village of criminals, so that it will once again be a placid and welcoming place like before.
Sanjuro will employ a cunning strategy. First he offers himself as a yojimbo (bodyguard) to the oyabun (boss) of one of the two gangs. Later he will also pretend to be working for the other gang as an infiltrator. And so, little by little, he will sabotage both gangs from the inside…
Commentary
This masterpiece of the chambara genre and of cinema in general starts from a simple yet very effective approach. The film would give rise to a sequel, “Sanjuro” (directed by Kurosawa the following year). The success of the film went beyond Japanese borders, becoming very popular in the West. The Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone made a free adaptation of “Yojimbo” as a western: “For a Fistful of Dollars” (1964). There is no doubt that samurai (or chambara) and western movies have countless parallels, and stories set in the Tokugawa era and with a lone ronin as the main character can be perfectly extrapolated to the context of the “Wild West” with a wandering gunslinger as the main figure (and by the way, both chambara and westerns are usually set in the same era, in the decades of the ’60s and ’70s of the nineteenth century).
“For a Fistful of Dollars”, the first of Leone’s famous dollar trilogy, launched Clint Eastwood to stardom, who in the Italo-western shot in Almeria has the same role as Toshiro Mifune in the ‘Yojimbo’ we are dealing with: pitting criminals against each other, decimating the gangs, clearing the town of evildoers, and (of course) making some personal financial gain. That is, no more and no less, the plot of the film. A very simple and effective story, as I mentioned before.
Kurosawa would denounce Leone (who saw his own film as a tribute to the Japanese master) for plagiarism, since the Italian did not pay royalties. But the truth is that Kurosawa and his screenwriter Ryuzo Kikushima were not too original either, since novels with a very similar story had already been written before (for example “Red Harvest”, by Dashiell Hammet, published in 1929).
Besides Mifune, Kurosawa’s favorite actor, Tatsuya Nakadai – whom we saw in the highly recommended “Harakiri” (1962) or in “Kwaidan” (1964) both by Masaki Kobayashi – also stands out as one of the swordsmen. In the cast we also find Takashi Shimura – who appears in “The Seven Samurai” (1954), also by Kurosawa (a film about which, by the way, a western remake would also be made: “The Magnificent Seven” by John Sturges, filmed in 1960). In a supporting role we see Ko Nishimura, an actor who would later become known in the “Kamisori Hanzo” trilogy starring Shintaro Katsu.
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