Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Eijiro Tono and Tatsuya Nakadai
SPOILERS IN THE LAST PARAGRAPH
"The time is 1860 ...
the emergence of a middle class
has brought about the end to power
of the Tokugawa Dynasty ...
A samurai, once a dedicated warrior
in the employ of Royalty,
now finds himself with master to serve
other than his own will to survive ...
... and no devices
outside of his wit and his sword"
So sayeth the opening titles of Kurosawa's Yojimbo. In those titles, Kurosawa introduces one of the major themes of the movie, the obsolescence of a once noble profession. So it is fitting that as I watched the movie 50 years after its release I was both struck by its mastery and its antiquity. Kurosawa is one of the great filmmakers and it shows throughout the film, but the samurai film, like the samurai belongs to a bygone era.
The plot follows our no-named hero, played by Toshiro Mifune as he tries to pit two rival sides against each other so he can profit from the aftermath. It's a well constructed plot with lots of betrayals, double agents and ambitious gambits. It can be hard to follow all the machinations, but that is the point. The only person in the film who knows what is going on is our hero and even as we see every move he makes, we still don't know what he is thinking. Mifune is an incredible screen presence, he towers over everyone and has the range to play a stoic enforcer and a roguish trickster. Sergio Leone remade Yojimbo as A Fistfull of Dollars and as iconic as Clint Eastwood's performance is as The Man with No Name, Mifune, a shorter man, feels like a more intimidating screen presence. Some of the acting in Yojimbo is hokey to a modern audience accustomed to neo-realistic acting, but Mifune dominates the movie and overshadows some of the broader performances in the film.
As someone who grew up watching both the macho action films of the 80s and 90s and the CGI-fests of the current era, things like poor stage fighting and bad foley work give the movie an amateurish quality. This is an unfair criticism, akin to saying that a Kia Sorento is more impressive than the original Model T, it's especially unfair given how well staged and shot everything else in this movie is. Kazuo Miyagawa's work in this film is brilliant, the shots of rain and windswept streets is some of the best black and white photography I have ever seen. I assume he used a trick like how he famously dyed rain in Rashomon, but it doesn't make the shots any less impressive. The movie contrasts tight shots from people trapped in their houses watching action through shutters with shots of the open area in the town's main street. The shots of the main street are impeccably constructed; we can follow all the action in the background and the foreground with ease and they are still beautifully shot.
In the second act of the film a gun is brought into the town and as one would expect it quickly shifts the power in favour of the party with the gun. Guns are more efficient weapons than samurai swords and unlike swords guns can inflict great damage in the hands of an amateur. In the third act the movie asks, would you rather trust an archaic master or an efficient amateur? I am accustomed to ruthless technical efficiency and use it to my benefit everyday, however in Yojimbo Kurosawa makes an unimpeachable case that the archaic master is the right choice.
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