Yojimbo
1 Oscar Nominations
Rent/Purchase
A nameless ronin, or samurai with no master, enters a small village in feudal Japan where two rival businessmen are struggling for control of the local gambling trade. Taking the name Sanjuro Kuwabatake, the ronin convinces both silk merchant Tazaemon and sake merchant Tokuemon to hire him as a personal bodyguard, then artfully sets in motion a full-scale gang war between the two ambitious and unscrupulous men.
What critics thought
Near-universally praised across decades, Yojimbo is seen as Kurosawa working in a looser, more playful register than his grander epics — a genre-blending samurai film that fuses action, dark comedy, and satire into something deceptively light. Critics note that it trades the philosophical weight of Rashomon and the scale of Seven Samurai for wit and kinetic pleasure, and argue that trade-off is more than worthwhile.
“comedy, satire, folk tale, action movie, Western, samurai film, and something like a musical without songs. As everyone says, this work is not as deep as Rashomon or as immediately memorable as Seven Samurai. But it is funnier than any Western from either side of the world, and its only competition, in a bleaker mode, would be Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).”
Michael Wood·London Review of Books
Genres
Action, Drama, Thriller
Cast & Crew
DirectorAkira Kurosawa
StarringToshirō Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yōko Tsukasa, Isuzu Yamada, Daisuke Katō
ComposerMasaru Satō
Yojimbo
1 Oscar Nominations
A nameless ronin, or samurai with no master, enters a small village in feudal Japan where two rival businessmen are struggling for control of the local gambling trade. Taking the name Sanjuro Kuwabatake, the ronin convinces both silk merchant Tazaemon and sake merchant Tokuemon to hire him as a personal bodyguard, then artfully sets in motion a full-scale gang war between the two ambitious and unscrupulous men.
What critics thought
Near-universally praised across decades, Yojimbo is seen as Kurosawa working in a looser, more playful register than his grander epics — a genre-blending samurai film that fuses action, dark comedy, and satire into something deceptively light. Critics note that it trades the philosophical weight of Rashomon and the scale of Seven Samurai for wit and kinetic pleasure, and argue that trade-off is more than worthwhile.
“comedy, satire, folk tale, action movie, Western, samurai film, and something like a musical without songs. As everyone says, this work is not as deep as Rashomon or as immediately memorable as Seven Samurai. But it is funnier than any Western from either side of the world, and its only competition, in a bleaker mode, would be Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).”
Michael Wood·London Review of Books
Genres
Action, Drama, Thriller
Cast & Crew
DirectorAkira Kurosawa
StarringToshirō Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yōko Tsukasa, Isuzu Yamada, Daisuke Katō
ComposerMasaru Satō
Rent/Purchase