YOJIMBO

Version: 2006 Criterion #52 DVD; English subtitles

Yojimbo is my favorite samurai movie. Why? Well, it's funny. I guess you could call it a black comedy if you want. A good number of the serious scenes have some humor to them. It is more of a serious movie than a comedy, but it's balanced.

Toshiro Mifune plays "Kuwabatake Sanjuro", which means "Mulberry Field Thirty Something". He's looking at a mulberry field as he says this, and adds "but I'm almost 40" at the end of the name. This movie is the first instance of the "man with no name" on film (the spaghetti westerns stole this, but more on that later). Since this is a Japanese name, the given name is last. So you would call him "Sanjuro".

The story is simple. After randomly wandering into a village, Sanjuro decides to free the people from the two factions that are fighting for control. He decides to pose as a bodyguard (Yojimbo means bodyguard) for each side and gets them to wipe each other out, freeing the village from the oppression. You've probably seen something like this before. Sergio Leone, a spaghetti western director, stole the whole plot of the film for his Fistful of Dollars. Dollars is basically shot for shot, with guns substituted for katana. No surprise, Yojimbo director Akira Kurosawa won a plagiarism suit against Leone.

The dialogue is great. A lot of good one-liners come from the movie. "Hungry dogs come running when they smell blood," "Whether you kill one or one hundred, you only hang once," and "I'll make sashimi out of them!" are my favorites. Granted, you have to read subtitles, but it's not that bad. And yes, it's black and white. Technicolor was expensive in 1961, especially for a Japanese film company.

Sanjuro may seem like a heartless killer, but over the course of the film you get some peeks at his soft side. I would definitely rent this one. They only reason I say rent is because Criterion releases are extremely expensive compared to regular DVDs. It cost me about $60 just to get this and the sequel Sanjuro. You need to know if you like the film before you sink in the cash.

See this movie, you'll thank me. :)