Le Garde du corps

YOJIMBO is an action drama about a rōnin who finds himself at the center of a conflict between the two crime lords.

A hungry and tired rōnin wanders through a desolate Japanese countryside. Soon, he arrives in a small town. A local caterer advises him to leave because, two local clans fight every day on the streets. However, a stranger decides to stay. The situation in a town is very good for one rōnin. This is a good chance that he earns some money. However, he does not need a bloody money. He wants to destroy local crime lords...

This tense story is full of lies, doubt, turning, pranks, blackmails and excellent fights. A careless and seemingly insensitive samurai is actually a peaceful and good man. Mr. Kurosawa has, under the influence of a western and noir, made a very exciting and visually impressive film. Of course, he has not neglected the significant situations that are related to the Japanese culture and tradition.

Close-ups, almost perfectly, reflect an evil, arrogance, fear, invincibility and contempt on faces of some of the protagonists. There is a large number of villains, which are quite different in character.

Toshiro Mifune (Kuwabatake Sanjuro) is a resourceful, interesting and determined as a wandering rōnin and master swordsman. He, apparently, enjoys in his machinations, however, his goal is extremely benevolent. He's kind of a lone hero, regardless of a tactical evil and theatrical swagger in his character.

His support are Tatsuya Nakadai as Unosuke a wild and insolent gunslinger and the biggest threat to a samurai. He is interesting because he is a completely different character from Sanjuro. Kyū Sazanka (Ushitora) and Seizaburo Kawazu (Seibei) are fairly inconclusive as crime lords. However their primary relationship "of a teacher and his student", could be interesting. Isuzu Yamada as Orin is the the wife of Seibei. She is perhaps an initiator of conflicts. Daisuke Katō as Inokichi is a visually the most memorable character. A character, who is capable to commit a vicious murder, but also make the greatest stupidity.

Simply, Mr. Kurosawa has managed to combine several styles in a small masterpiece.

If you ever watched Pulp Fiction and thought: movie cool was born here, or maybe you saw any single Sergio Leone movie and thought: this guy invented movie-cool (if you haven't, i thoroughly recommend it - Kill Bill is nothing to his Good, the Bad and the Ugly or Once Upon a Time in the West), then experience Yojimbo, or The Bodyguard. Kurosawa's camera sits behind Toshiro Mifune's man-with-no-name, inviting us to look up at the back of his head as he walks the earth, inviting us to be in awe of this man. And as he walks, super-cool walking-the-earth music plays. Later on, when he's taunted and asked to prove himself, he slices a guy's arm off and plays the petty, money-grabbing rival factions in the town he wanders into off each other.

If you have it in your mind that a guy called Kurosawa couldn't make movies that would impress you, that the cultural gap would be too great - be assured that Kurosawa's movies are rife with Western values. Sure, they are rife with Japanese values (i am told), but Kurosawa had a great appreciation of Western culture. He based many of his movies on Western texts, like Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or American gangster fiction and film. Yojimbo is one of the latter - inspired by the Dashiell Hammet novel Red Harvest (Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon was put onscreen moment for moment by John Huston in the movie of the same name which immortalised Humphrey Bogart).

Actually, the history of the story of the lone wolf, the wanderer with a weapon, who rides into town to play off two warring factions against each other - is quite a story itself. Dashiell Hammett, an American, wrote a novel with an American private eye as the stranger. In 1961, Akira Kurosawa transposed this story to medieval Japan, after the fall of a dynasty, where a Samurai finds himself with no place to go (at the beginning, we see him throw a branch up in the air and walk the direction it falls), and no master to serve. A bodyguard with no-one to protect. In 1964, Sergio Leone transposed the screenplay of Yojimbo (nearly word for word) to the spanish desert, and he brought along a young television actor named Clint Eastwood, and together they revolutionised the western with Fistfull of Dollars, and created an entire genre, the Spaghetti Western, which sported among its attributes a gritty, desolate landscape, and a cynical, postmodern lack-of-values ideology (traditional American westerns had quite plush landscapes and were always black and white (good and evil) in their value system. Despite the massive influence of Fistfull of Dollars, it pales in comparison to both its predecessor Yojimbo, and its sequals, For a Few Dollars More and The Good the Bad and the Ugly. But still, both Yojimbo and Fistful are iconic movies, and very cool movies.

With cool music, a cool anti-hero, a fun script, and a visually spectacular canvas of an image, painted by the eye of an artist (it is said that Kurosawa storyboarded his movies in full-scale paintings), Yojimbo is one of the coolest movies ever made.

I just figured out why Toshirô Mifune is so mesmerizing to watch. It's just the way he expresses himself. This guy's amazing!

I've been exploring the halls of Kurosawa and it's getting hard to leave. Yojimbo is a FUN film to watch. Toshiro as the samurai steals almost every scene he is in and I think the epitome of his character is when he's in Gonji's place lying on the floor. He doesn't brag, but when he goes into action, that's it! As soon as he enters the chaotic town, he doesn't seem fazed at all and actually enjoys it. His demeanor is really amusing and it's great watching his plan unfold; how he manipulates both groups to get his way (it's really funny). Great thing too is he's not really a hero and he's not entirely a villain. He doesn't hesitate to kill, but does so methodically. You also have "characters" including Gonji, the thugs from both sides, and Unosuke with an ace up his sleeve (or robe?) which makes things really interesting.

Yojimbo's mix of dark humor, action, and a great performance from Mifune make for a Kurosawa classic.

Classic samurai action pic; often imitated but never equalled. Mifune creates a memorable character (who appeared in a sequel) in the Ronin who decides the course of his life on the toss of a stick, and ends up risking his life to save a village full of peasants he finds revolting. It's possible to see "Yojimbo's" actions as either heroic or as the game of a bored warrior in need of amusement -- as often in Kurosawa's films, the fact that the characters' motives remain open to interpretation adds depth to the film.

Wonderful images, and skillful direction that keeps the pace of the storytelling tight and tells most of the story through images -- this is the kind of film that is so good it can be watched a silent film without losing too much of its impact or meaning.

I think that if Kurosawa had spent more of his time in litigation and less making movies, he might have made a living for the rest of his life off all the movies that have ripped off this movie. Certainly Eastwood's "Man with No Name" character owes a lot to Mifune's contribution; not only in Leone's films (the first of which borrows its entire plot from Kurosawa; a court settlement ensued which made sure Kurosawa made most of the profits from "Fistful of Dollars" in Asia his own) but also in Eastwood's best film as a director -- "High Plains Drifter", which borrows scenes such as Eastwood's rebuke of the villagers from "Yojimbo".

The really funny thing about all this, and what not too many American critics or audiences have noted, is that "Yojimbo" is itself a western. All the ingredients for a western are here, and the film's plot and style obviously owe a debt to Zinnemann's "High Noon". "Yojimbo" even borrows the device of time, setting up a confrontation at 3:00 a.m. as shouted by the town crier. I like "Yojimbo" better than "High Noon", so I don't want to go too far into this line of thought....

If I had to choose only one movie for film students to learn from, this would be it. Other films may be more profound, or their imagery more groundbreaking, but this one is so tightly constructed that nothing - not a frame, word, or gesture - is extraneous.

Toshiro Mifune, one of the world's most charismatic actors, is perfection as a tough loner of a samurai who takes it upon himself to clean up a town corrupted by two gambling clans. Swirling through and around him is a story that is both technically flawless and profoundly moving.

Kurosawa meticulously infuses every detail with meaning; there's a purpose behind every shot, and aspiring directors should pay close attention (why is the camera slightly tilted? why are there concubines in the background?). His economy of style was never more amazing; watch as the samurai rides into town, and the director establishes the atmosphere with exactly one jaw-dropping shot. And the story is equally well-crafted, with no plot holes and no inconsistencies.

A wonderful tale that rolls beautifully from start to finish. See it, see it, see it!!