Yojimbo

Toshiro Mifune was named Best Actor at Venice for his spirited performance in Yojimbo, a jaw-droppingly kinetic jidai-geki (period film) that has been called “Kurosawa’s most commanding film: a visually faultless and highly sophisticated satire on violence and human weakness” (Sight and Sound). Mifune plays Sanjuro (“Thirty Years Old”), a scruffy, unheroic ronin (masterless samurai) who, wandering into a town divided by civil war between an evil silk merchant and an evil saké merchant, sees an opportunity to profit — by hiring himself out as a yojimbo (bodyguard) to both sides. The film is beautifully photographed in widescreen by the great cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon, Ugetsu), and abounds in brilliantly choreographed sword-swinging violence. Its box office success in Japan led to Sanjuro, a sequel also featuring Mifune; it was also the source for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. “A triumph of bravura technique . . . explosively comic and exhilarating . . . One of the rare Japanese films that is both great and funny to American audiences” (Pauline Kael). “The best-filmed of any of Kurosawa’s pictures . . . [and] his first full-length comedy” (Donald Richie). B&W, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 110 mins.