A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #52: Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

You might know the remake of this film bet­ter than Yojimbo itself. Clint East­wood and Ser­gio Leone retold it as A Fist­ful of Dol­lars. I’ve not actu­ally seen A Fist­ful of Dol­lars, but this is the sec­ond time I’ve seen Yojimbo. While the film isn’t as deep or ripe for crit­i­cal analy­sis as many of Kurosawa’s other works, it also isn’t as shal­low and anti­cli­mac­tic as the Cri­te­rion Essay indi­cates. Alexan­der Sesonke states that:

Mifune achieved inter­na­tional star­dom in Kurosawa’s films of the 1950s, emerg­ing as an actor of com­pelling power, capa­ble of a great range and sub­tlety of expres­sion. But as San­juro, no sub­tlety is nec­es­sary — sheer phys­i­cal pres­ence suffices.

Yet what kept con­stantly catch­ing my atten­tion was the sub­tle cun­ning and glee that San­juro takes in play­ing the war­ring gangs against each other. He almost always has a smar­tass grin lurk­ing when open dis­dain is not present. His phys­i­cal pres­ence suf­fices for the two-​dimensional sup­port­ing char­ac­ters he manip­u­lates, but the audi­ence and the innkeeper [the only other char­ac­ter to show actual devel­op­ment in the film] are privy to the strate­gic mas­tery that is Sanjuro’s true strength.

The innkeeper shouldn’t be dis­re­garded. He is the only per­son we see in the film that takes an inde­pen­dent role and sees no point in the fight­ing. His dis­dain stands in oppo­site to the undertaker/​cooper and Sanjuro’s view of the war as an oppor­tu­nity. Their dif­fer­ent opin­ions are based on eco­nom­ics, the innkeeper’s cus­tom has been hurt by the fight, while for the under­taker busi­ness is boom­ing, but they also reflect the per­son­al­i­ties of the char­ac­ters themselves.

As San­juro plays one side against the other, the innkeeper slowly comes to under­stand that, though he is mer­ce­nary, San­juro is vir­tu­ous under­neath. An easy dis­tinc­tion between good and evil would not have caught Sanjuro’s atten­tion the way that the bad ver­sus worse sit­u­a­tion that actu­ally exists in the town does. This nov­elty appeals to a true ronin lifestyle, self-​serving but not appear­ing so, and well-​suited to such a mal­ad­justed, mis­an­thropic per­son­al­ity as San­juro. Even after he gets his ass handed to him and is near death, his spirit is never more alive. This is where it is eas­i­est to see how West­ern in intent is Yojimbo; with its par­tic­u­lar style of deter­mi­na­tion and intent. It is some­what hilar­i­ous but not unex­pected then, that a film made with delib­er­ate West­ern influ­ence would be picked up and redone by a West­ern direc­tor. Although there is prob­a­bly less dif­fer­ence between East and West than mod­ern and traditional.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Alexan­der Sesonske
• Roger Ebert Essay
• Stu­dent Essay com­par­ing the film to Fist­ful of Dol­lars
• Crit­i­cal com­par­i­son of Yojimbo and Fist­ful of Dol­lars
• A briefer com­par­i­son of the films
• YouTube com­par­sion between a few scenes of Seven Samurai/​Magnificent Seven and Yojimbo/​Fistful of Dollars