Yojimbo

There's a movie I need you to watch.

It's called Yojimbo (translation: Bodyguard). It came out in 1961 and was directed by Akira Kurosawa (the same guy who did The Seven Samurai). Okay, yes, it's a black-and-white film, and yes, it has subtitles. If those things turn you off, this isn't a movie for you.

But before you click away, I have words for you: Clint Eastwood as a samurai.

Did that get your attention? This movie was the inspiration for A Fistful of Dollars. 

Maybe you don't like black-and-white films. Maybe you hate reading subtitles. Maybe you're just not sure about foreign films. But this one will blow all your preconceived notions out of the water. It neither looks nor feels like a slow, plodding, drably acted, melodramatic noir film (which is immediately what jumps to my mind whenever I think "black-and-white movie"). This movie hooks you in, from the very first shot of the back of Toshirō Mifune's grizzled head staring out over the majestic snow-capped mountains of post-feudal Japan.

This is an excellent film, plain and simple. And I don't say that about every film, you know. It's a well-established fact that my movie collection includes some genuine stinkers, all heavy on CG and light on cinematography: Van Helsing, the X-Men trilogy, Spider-man 3, Peter Jackson's King Kong, and others (though thankfully nothing so mindless as Beerfest). I own some films that are a complete waste of a time, without plot, fully-rounded characters, intelligent dialogue, good special effects, evocative soundtracks, or any other redeeming feature. But I do pride myself on having the brains to know that they stink. 

Simply put, I know a good movie when I see one (it doesn't happen often). This one blew me away. For cinematography, dialogue, plot, and sheer acting ability, not to mention an ominous score and a premise that's simultaneously timeless, deathless, and endlessly captivating, Yojimbo is unmatched.

The plot: a lone, freelance samurai (a ronin), played by the inimitable Toshirō Mifune, finds his way to a town terrorized by two criminal gangs in late 19th-century Japan, and immediately hires himself out to both sides as a yojimbo, or bodyguard...a hired thug, basically. Armed with nothing more than his wits and an extremely sharp sword, and through a series of brilliant schemes, subtle espionage, and deadly showdowns, the ronin forces the rival gangs to destroy one another. 

Sound familiar? It should. This same plot was featured in the first of Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars. Clint Eastwood's roving, taciturn, cold-hearted, pragmatic bounty hunter, The Man With No Name, is based on Mifune's unshakably deadpan ronin in Yojimbo, who names himself after whatever he happens to be looking at when someone asks him his name: Sanjuro Kuwabatake, or "Thirty-Year-Old Mulberry Field." Both Eastwood's "Man With No Name" and Mifune's "Sanjuro" find a small, backwater town being terrorized by rival gangs and cleverly trick them into killing each other off (losing some of their own blood in the process), leading up to a final, epic showdown.

That Yojimbo inspired a Western (even a spaghetti Western) is poetically just, for it was inspired by Westerns. Director Akira Kurosawa was a big fan of Hollywood's cowboy movies and the themes portrayed in them, particularly the timeless and infallibly riveting showdown of good vs. evil. John Ford's dry, windblown streets, the unmistakably bad guys terrorizing goodhearted but timid townspeople, dilapidated towns full of dusty, rickety buildings, and lawless frontiers where might makes right are all present in many of Kurosawa's jidaigeki, or period dramas. Yet Kurosawa adapted those Western themes and made them indelibly Japanese, turning Yojimbo into a one-of-a-kind "Eastern," where the bad guys wear topknots instead of black hats, the dusty windblown streets have a torii gate and a Shinto shrine at the end of them, and the hero mows his enemies down not with a hail of bullets from a six-gun but with a series of lightning-fast strikes from a katana.

The result is...well, I wish I could be more eloquent than this, but the result is so freaking cool. We have plot. We have theme. We have Kurosawa's immortal cinematography and editing, where cuts are made on motion and are almost seamless, where the actors in speaking roles create intriguing visual geometries on-screen and we aren't just cutting back and forth between talking heads, where wide-angle shots make you feel like you're watching the action from a front-row seat. We have good acting: Mifune's gruff, unflappable samurai Sanjuro and Tatsuya Nakadai's sinister-looking, gun-toting villain Unosuke both stand out as memorable performances. The supporting cast, mainly playing brutish thugs with crooked teeth or scruffy whiskers, is a joy to watch as well. Yes, my friends, this is epicness, and not as the Millennial generation has defined it (a flip performed on a snowboard or the most humongous Michael Bay movie explosion yet), but real movie magic, the cathartic joy that comes from watching a film that has it all: a good story, a vivid setting, characters who feel real and whom you can root for, and an ending you wish would never come. Dialogue is good, too: Sanjuro is refreshingly blunt with his scumbag employers, and his final discussion with a fallen Unosuke is at once satisfying and bone-chilling. The movie keeps the suspense up; one never knows what's going to happen next. Sanjuro switches sides like lightning, the situation seems poised to boil over at every turn, only to be delayed until the final climax. The eerie, percussive score helps. The heavy beating of drums, the sinister rumble of horns, and the dissonant whine of flutes punctuate every rise and fall of the action, their otherworldly cadence pervading the movie. The subterranean accompaniment is appropriate for a movie of this type. Cut off from the world he knows by the death of his master and the changing times in Japan, Sanjuro is doing the only thing he knows how to do: outwit the bad guys and kill them to a man. Even if he gets beaten or bloodied in the process (and he does), he will never quit following his swordsman's code, even if life as he knows it crumbles around his ears.

I highly recommend this film. Whether you're a fan of Sergio Leone's TGTBTU trilogy, want to compare Westerns with Easterns, or have fallen in love with foreign films (as this film caused me to do), Yojimbo will resonate with you on some primeval level. I dare you to resist the impulse to grab a sword, put on a kimono and go out and fight bad guys after seeing it. It's impossible.