Yojimbo (1961)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Film Review

Whilst Yojimbo, one of Akira Kurosawa's best known and most commercially successful films, appears to be the archetypal jidai-geki, a lush period piece crafted with immense skill and a striking sense of realism, it was intended by its director to serve as a bleak commentary on the corruption and criminality that had become endemic in post-war Japan.  Kurosawa sets out to condemn not only the rise of gang culture (the Yakuza) but also the unholy alliance between the country's political and industrial leaders.  The relentlessly dark tone of the film sets it apart from Kurosawa's previous jidai-geki films and reflects the director's growing distate for the soulless consumerism that had begun to transform Japan, debasing its cultural heritage and robbing it of a spiritual identity.

And yet, bizarrely (given its bleak subject matter and even bleaker subtext), Yojimbo stands as the funniest of Kurosawa's films.  An outright black comedy, it use humour (often outrageously) to poke fun at corrupt officials and those who would sell their soul just to make a quick buck.  Kurosawa subverts the conventions of the jidai-geki genre brilliantly for comical effect, deconstructing the Samurai myth, in order to deliver a cogent allegory on the moral decay that the director felt was overtaking present day Japan.  Unusually for Kurosawa, the film has not one sympathetic character; everyone is out for what he or she can get and has no redeeming features, and this includes the central Samurai protagonist (superbly played by Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune) who rejects every part of the Samurai code, offering his services for money and behaving in an underhand manner throughout, an obvious caricature of those authority figures in Japanese society who had sold out for personal gain.  Kazuo Miyagawa's high contrast photography, which brings an unbreakable mood of oppression, seediness and nihilism to the film, reinforces the impression of a community that is degenerating into animal savagery, a festering jungle in which only the strongest and most ruthless will survive.  Today, the film's pungent subtext is still readily discernible -  cinema has yet to come up with a more brutally condemnatory assault on capitalism than this.

Yojimbo not only attacks the moral climate of modern day Japan, it also dealt a decisive death blow to a kind of film that Kurosawa loathed, the chambara or populist Japanese action film.  Unlike the jidai-geki, which respected historical accuracy and had a high art content, the chambara gave a totally distorted view of Japan's feudal past and were intended only as a form of mass entertainment, often made on a low budget and invariably comicbook-like in their narrative content.  The extreme violence seen in Yojimbo, in which characters are visibly seen to suffer as they are (literally) hacked to pieces in the spectacular action sequences, exposes the crass shallowness of the chambara genre and encouraged other Japanese filmmakers to employ a more realistic approach in their films.  The bloodless chambara soon gave way to more spectacularly gory successors, the Tokusatsu and Yakuza films, which revelled in bloodshed and human misery.

In common with many of Kurosawa's films, Yojimbo has its origins in western culture.  Loosely adapted from Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest, the  film also shows the influence of the classic American western and film noir very visibly, both in its atmospheric composition (most of the film takes place at night under a blanket of stifling darkness) and the way in which the location and the elements (notably the wind) become central to the action (as in a John Ford western), not merely a static backdrop.  The stylistic and tonal similarities with Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952) are also quite evident, and Masaru Sato's jaunty score owes far more to western influences than traditional Japanese culture.  The impression that Yojimbo is little more than an unashamed pastiche of the Hollywood western is reinforced when you recall that director Sergio Leone remade it as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the first in a series of popular spaghetti western in which Clint Eastwood found fame as the unnamed mercenary gunman, the western equivalent of the Ronin Samurai.  (Leone's omission to secure remake rights from Kurosawa resulted in a protracted and costly legal battle which delayed the release of Leone's film by several years and made Kurosawa a very wealthy man.)   Yojimbo has been the inspiration for a number of other films since, most notably Walter Hill's gangster-themed remake Last Man Standing (1996).

Yojimbo was the second film that Kurosawa made for his newly founded independent production company and was a welcome success after the failure of his first independent film, The Bad Sleep Well (1960), a reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet in which he addressed similar concerns about corruption in modern Japan (albeit far more directly).  Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kurosawa embraced the switch to the widescreen process and exploited its potential to the full - as can be seen from the masterfully choregraphed fight sequences in Yojimbo which effortlessly fill every inch of the screen and give the film immense dramatic and comedic power.  Toshiro Mifune, one of Kurosawa's most frequent collaborators, returns to play the invincible Samurai that he portrayed so magnificently in earlier films, such as Seven Samurai (1954) and The Hidden Fortress (1958).  Mifune's improbable combination of bear-like physique and balletic grace makes him ideal for the part of Yojimbo's main character, the mercenary Ronin named Sanjuro Kuwabatake (which translates as 'Mulberry Field thirty-year-old', an obvious alias intended to conceal his true identity).  The ease with which Sanjuro dispatches his opponents should be ludicrously comical, but Mifune's skill with a sword and the way he gracefully moves across the screen like a human whirlwind dispels any sense of absurdity.  So successful was Yojimba that Kurosawa followed it up with an immediate sequel, Sanjuro (1962), with Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai (another superb, equally charismatic actor) returning for a second, even bloodier showdown.

Film Synopsis

Japan, 1860.  With the country in a state of terminal decline following the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, a Ronin Samurai who has fallen on hard times arrives at a small provincial town that has degenerated into gang warfare.   Two rival gangs, one controlled by a saké merchant, the other by a silk merchant, are in a continual state of war and are eager to secure the services of the Samurai, whose mastery of the sword will ensure their side wins the eternal feud.  But the Samurai is unimpressed with either gang.  In his eyes, neither side deserves to triumph over the other.  So, whilst taking money from each gang, he arranges things so that they will destroy each other...