Kurosawa Akira understood the American western beyond the mythos of the lone warrior. The western is one of the most political of genres, concerned with how resources are dispersed. The struggle in American westerns between various enforcers embodies the tug of war between the working-class and robber barons, and Kurosawa saw in these stories parallels to Japan’s fraught cultural shifts. In the case of 1961’s Yojimbo, and to a lesser extent its sequel, 1962’s Sanjuro, he uses the western template to riff on Japan’s postwar leap into capitalism.
The very first conversation in Yojimbo is between a ronin who calls himself Sanjuro (Mifune Toshiro) and a man who regrets the new generation’s obsession with money. Kurosawa stages this encounter as a comic scene, but the man’s alienation stings, especially as Kurosawa lingers on the rhythmic sound of his wife working her loom for the silk she weaves as a side hustle.
The sound of the loom is the sort of operatic emphasis of detail in which Kurosawa specializes. It serves as a refrain, underscoring the tensions of Sanjuro’s loaded conversation with the couple, while foreshadowing the struggle that will drive the movie: gang warfare as an insidious misdirection from barons’ reach for monopolies over the silk and sake industries. We’re about to watch one of the most visceral of westerns, and yet this poetic scene with the woman and her loom could fit comfortably in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Yojimbo’s premise, concerning fisticuffs between samurai and ruffians that distract the populace from the seizure of power by white-collar thugs, has only grown more pertinent to our present day. Yojimbo is so stylish and exhilarating that it’s easy to overlook its thornier implications—troubling themes that are embodied by the fuddy-duddies at the film’s margins who’re quietly committing atrocities, including selling women into sexual slavery. The action-comedy elements lull us, allowing us to ignore these barons until their evil can no longer be avoided, spurring a reckoning of fire and bloodshed that Kurosawa conveys on screen with biblical force.
This distraction on the part of the audience is forgivable, as the flash of Kurosawa’s aesthetic is characteristically astonishing. There’s a reason that Yojimbo became one of the iconic templates for action films across the globe: It’s direct and profoundly vivid, a masterful triumph in wedding sound and image and utilizing the faces of actors to personalize themes that are topical yet also universal to the point of suggesting a fable. The opening credits alone are more thrilling than many entire contemporary action movies, composed of Mifune in a variety of alternating close-ups and landscape shots as he wanders the countryside to Satô Masaru’s thunderous score, which is bold and mischievous, priming us for amorality.
Yojimbo is a mercenary comedy, in which a working-class warrior uses his wits and vicious skill to compel a capitalist machine to destroy itself. This ability to get shit done, right now, is the appeal of the lone-enforcer archetype, whether it’s Shane, Dirty Harry, or John Wick. Yet most movies ask us to attach a moral pretense to vigilantism, so that we may not get our hands too dirty in our pursuit of immediate vicarious gratification. For a while, Yojimbo doesn’t forge such a pact with its audience, and it’s this swaggering amorality that proved so influential to pop culture. Sanjuro is a rock star. It’s exhilarating to be asked to root for a man who might be capable of anything, especially if that man has the narcotic sexual charisma of Mifune Toshiro.
There’s a heavy earthiness to Mifune here, which is a contrast from the flakier, more frenetic characters that he played for Kurosawa in earlier collaborations, such as Rashomon and Seven Samurai. Mifune’s face is fuller and hairier here, and the actor makes you conscious of Sanjuro’s connection to the ground. Sanjuro seems solid, like a tree in the countryside, even if he in reality drifts like tumbleweed from one adventure to the next. There’s also an impression of latent force in Mifune’s performance that clashes unpredictably with the generosity that he allows to quietly run through Sanjuro. And Kurosawa knows what he’s got in his leading man, with the opening credits alone carving Mifune’s visage into cinema’s Mount Rushmore.
If Yojimbo were composed only of recurring scenes of Mifune’s Sanjuro walking up and down the central street of the setting and facing down henchmen, it may have been enough to render it a classic. But our awareness of the real villains keeps complicating and enriching the experience of watching Kurosawa’s film. For a work of art that’s foundational to action cinema, there’s not as much carnage in Yojimbo as you might expect—not until the climax that finally asks us to confront the weight of the society’s greed and bloodshed.
Mifune isn’t the only artist here in tune with the idea of latent force, as Kurosawa fashions palavers into spellbinding planes of verbal action. Villagers open walls and windows, forging movies within movies that quickly establish the power matrices organizing the society. These scenes have a gossipy, lurid power that draws us deeper into the film, until the release of physical violence that’s staged so precisely and quickly that it’s practically subliminal. The cross-cuts of Sanjuro’s sword are the exclamation points to a larger carnival of paranoia and avarice.
Sanjuro doesn’t have the rippling cathartic effect of its predecessor. It’s not intended to, as it’s positioned by Kurosawa as a palette-cleansing comedy in the wake of Yojimbo’s success. As such, audiences drunk on Yojimbo’s apocalyptic comic imagery may find that Sanjuro takes a little getting used to. This time, Sanjuro finds himself cleaning up not a rotten community but a rotten clan that’s set up nine naïve samurai to take the fall for a coup. Here, we’re talking less the pitfalls of a new mercenary capitalist age than the old hypocrisies of a caste system.
Worldly Sanjuro must teach these silly samurai not to take their own gospel so seriously, for it sets them up as sitting ducks. He teaches them to work smart rather than hard, and not to fetishize needless death. Early in Kurosawa’s film, as the samurai are about to jump into certain death in a battle against an army that significantly outnumbers them, Sanjuro lands one of the funniest lines in either film: “The foolishness never ends.”
The swordplay in Sanjuro is perhaps even more impressive than it is in Yojimbo, though the gentler tone gives the film an altogether softer effect (at least until the conclusion, which features an extraordinarily disturbing act of bloodletting that restores the alienation of Yojimbo). Think Jane Austen goes to Japan, with an emphasis on how manners dictate transmissions of power, and more than a splash of cutesy comedy. (As a person who generally takes his samurai pictures black, with not much sugar, I admit that a little of the nine samurai goes a long way, even if their befuddlement with Sanjuro is amusing.)
Remember the oddness in Terminator 2: Judgment Day of pairing a lethal badass machine with a young boy, in the process mixing 1980s-era Spielbergian corn with James Cameron’s heavy-metal violence? Sanjuro has a similar mixture of whimsy and machismo. A kinder, softer Sanjuro, perhaps scared from endless wandering battle, is in its own way as robust as the colder and more calculating Sanjuro of Yojimbo, and it allows for Mifune to invent essentially a new, equally memorable character under the guise of reprise.
At a certain point in Sanjuro, the elaborate comedy of manners grows tiresome, as complications of Kurosawa, Kikushima Ryûzô, Oguni Hideo’s script are piled on to diminishing effect. Hostage negotiations, bungled undercover work, and the like don’t matter much because we haven’t been quite led into the sort of multipronged network of evil that drives Yojimbo. Sanjuro is still a lesson from a master in mounting choreography and sustaining momentum, though it remains more of an exercise rather than a work of flesh and blood.
Image/Sound
Created from the original 35mm camera negatives, the 4K transfers of Yojimbo and Sanjuro both look phenomenal. In each case, the image boasts robust depth of focus, vivid facial and clothing textures, and velvety black hues, especially evident in the prismatic shadows that envelope each film at pivotal junctures. And yet neither film looks too scrubbed, as a healthy and attractive element of grain remains. Each release includes two audio tracks: a Japanese LPCM monaural and a Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 3.0. I prefer the monaural tracks for their fidelity to the films’ original presentations, but no issues were discernible in any of the various mixes. They are visceral, enveloping, and fastidiously assembled.
Extras
Film historian Stephen Prince’s audio commentaries for both films, recorded in 2006, have been ported over to these new editions. As any admirer of Japanese cinema worth their salt knows, Prince, the author of The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, is a formidable scholar in the vein of Donald Richie, offering distinctively exhilarating mixtures of cultural history and aesthetic analysis. Excerpts from the archival documentary Akira Kurosawa: It’s Wonderful to Create have been included with each film as well, and while the stories are solid for making-of fare, we’re still essentially in EPK territory. Better are the new essays by Alexander Sesonske and Michael Sragow that are included in the liner notes. Rounding out the packages are various collections trailers, teasers, and photo galleries.
Overall
A genre-defining Kurosawa masterwork and its fascinating companion piece have been furnished with suitably lush and bold new transfers.
Score:
Cast: Mifune Toshiro, Nakadai Tatsuya, Tsukasa Yôko, Yamada Isuzu, Katô Daisuke, Kawazu Seizaburô, Shimura Takashi, Tachikawa Hiroshi, Natsuki Yosuke, Tôno Eijirô, Kobayashi Keiju, Kayama Yûzô, Dan Reiko, Irie Takako, Shimizu Masao, Itô Yûnosuke Director: Kurosawa Akira Screenwriter: Kikushima Ryûzô, Kurosawa Akira, Oguni Hideo Distributor: The Criterion Collection Running Time: 110, 95 min Rating: NR Year: 1961, 1962 Release Date: January 7, 2025 Buy: Video
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