Review: Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" is a classic, and "Sanjuro" is even better
Movie of the Week #24 is an iconic jidaigeki double bill
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Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo is perhaps the greatest and most classic example of a film with such a terrific central character that all the propulsive weight of the story is centered in our transfixed gaze upon the protagonist.
Yojimbo is a cut above for many reasons, of course – for its terrific widescreen cinematography and lived-in mise-en-scene, its tight, deadly effective pacing, Kurosawa’s brilliant sense of character and narrative detail, etc. – but no one would deny that the film’s central enticement is Toshiro Mifune, at the height of his legendary movie star prowess, and his brilliant evocation of the masterless samurai Sanjuro. The propulsion of the film isn’t so much “what will happen next?” or “where shall the story go from here?” but “what will Sanjuro do next?” and “what trick does he have up his sleeve this time?” It is a small but crucial difference, in that the story itself and all the details therein are really just foundations laid to give Sanjuro room to play. The audience is carried along, episode to episode, not so much for their investment in the story – though it is an excellent yarn, one that has been borrowed many times all around the world – but because they are fascinated by Sanjuro, and by Mifune, and want to see what he will do next.
Kurosawa is fully cognizant of this, as each episode sees Sanjuro playing an even greater or more complex trick than the last, and somehow always coming out on top – until, of course, he doesn’t. The film’s greatness is cemented when it takes an unexpected turn in the final act, and Sanjuro is revealed to be less than omniscient. He is allowed to fail, to be taken captive, to be beaten and made weak – the kind of wringer all the best movie heroes go through, but plenty of lesser films nevertheless forget to construct – and when this happens, the propulsion shifts from “what will he do next?” to “how will he get out of this one,” or “how will he rise back to the top?” A film in which Sanjuro stayed all-powerful throughout would be fun, but lightweight. Yojimbo has a real heft to it, for when we reach the end, and Sanjuro stares down Ushitora’s gang, there is a such weight resting upon the scene. Sanjuro has failed before. He has risen back up, but is he still more powerful than all these men? A great deal of things have happened in the film to bring us to this moment, and the weight of all them, dynamic and compelling, fuels the suspense of the climactic standoff.
Mifune’s performance is so brilliant, and for an actor who could so successfully go very, very big, what amazes me about his work here is that it is remarkably understated. Sanjuro feels incredibly lived-in, as if Mifune had played this character a hundred times before, and is entirely comfortable in the character’s skin; yet there is such mystery to him, which of course propels our interest in his actions. It is a performance built on small details, like the way he strokes his chin, or the gaze he exerts upon others when examining them, or when he sits back deep in thought. Mifune’s intense physicality comes out in the final act, when Sanjuro is so weak and beaten that he cannot even walk, and it is a strong, shocking, and almost disturbing contrast with the powerful and confident man we saw up to that point. The question of Sanjuro’s morality and motivations lingers over the whole film, and is never answered; he clearly cares not for money, nor for gratitude, yet it is hard to call him selfless, given that the town, although ‘quiet’ again, is otherwise dead at the end. Did he do all this for his own amusement? It is possible – the character is a tough nut to crack, and the only one who appears to have done so is Mifune himself. His command of the screen is seemingly effortless, and resolutely absolute.
The film is littered with great characters, of course, as one would expect of a Kurosawa film, and many of them are brought to life by a similar attention to small details. Ino, a diminutive and dim-witted member of Ushitora’s gang played by Kurosawa regular Daisuke Katō, is illuminated completely in his first scene just by the way he has to count on his fingers, and the strange pride he takes in the death count. There are so many details like this across the film, from which full-bodied characters are consistently fleshed out. And it is all captured in some of Kurosawa’s finest cinematography, shot by the legendary Kazuo Miyagawa, with an absolute glorious sensibility for the space of the widescreen frame. Look at the scene where Ushitora sits with Sanjuro in the restaurant, each sitting on a bench, the width of the screen allowing them to share the space in a single image – it is such a dynamic shot for such a simple scene, and raises the sly tension of the moment. Or consider all the shots of gang members arranged in horizontal rows, these iconic standoffs taking place in wide compositions, a visual language Sergio Leone would borrow (along with many other pieces of the film) for his Dollars trilogy, and which would become an indelible part of Western film framing from this point forward. Width is essential to the storytelling, and sometimes to the development of characters themselves, as in Sanjuro’s escape where Mifune crawls desperately across the vast width of the frame. And Masaru Sato’s score is simply one of the greats, constantly enhancing our sense of excitement, building our investment in Sanjuro and kicking off every big moment with a bang. An intoxicating score for an intoxicating film.
And yet? As good and influential and game-changing as Yojimbo is, I like its sequel even more, and it isn’t even a competition.
Sanjuro is a sly little masterwork that builds unassumingly to one of the most shocking and widely imitated endings in film history. But for my money, the astonishing shower of violence that caps the film, and for which it is most remembered, is only one small part of what elevates Sanjuro to such compelling heights. Most sequels are about expanding the scope and stakes, testing the hero and pushing them beyond the limits established in the previous adventure. Sanjuro works because it does the exact opposite, constantly zigging where we expect it to zag. The character was already tested plenty in Yojimbo, after all, and survived by the skin of his teeth. So in Sanjuro, Kurosawa has the character slumming it in a fairly low-stakes conflict of political corruption way beneath his paygrade – and that’s the fun of it.
While many of Kurosawa’s films, Yojimbo included, have strong threads of humor, Sanjuro is his absolute comic masterpiece. Humor permeates the film, all of it realized with a playfulness that is positively infectious, and that starts with Kurosawa’s absolutely perfect, surgically precise, weapons-grade deployment of Mifune’s magnetic star persona. He is a goddamn riot in every single scene here, whether joyfully deceiving the corrupt official and playing enemies off one another, or dealing with the stress of the young, naïve samurai he has taken under his wing. Nobody made a meal out of costumes and props like Mifune did, and you can see that here in how he uses the kimono he wears while undercover in the court; everything you need to know about Sanjuro is there in how uncomfortably he wears it, scratching and squirming in its confines like a dog in a cone.
As great an achievement as the widescreen cinematography was in Yojimbo, I get and even greater kick out of Kurosawa uses the scope frame in Sanjuro to such consistent comedic effect (with Fukuzo Koizumi and up-and-coming Kurosawa regular Takao Saito taking over for Miyagawa). The sheer amount of fun Kurosawa has building all these complex compositions of the nine young samurai huddled around a bored or annoyed Sanjuro – like they’re the seven dwarfs and Snow White is an aging, mischievous ronin – is so palpable you can practically hear the director cackling from behind the camera. When I next teach the basic concept of ‘blocking’ to a film class, Sanjuro is the first film I plan on grabbing off the shelf. The story itself is not inherently humorous, and the script – which wasn’t even planned as a Mifune vehicle until the success of Yojimbo led to a last-minute restructuring – is pretty straightforward; the laughs come primarily from how Kurosawa plants and moves bodies throughout the frame, with a precise sense of visual comedy that feels more akin to great animation than live-action fare.
The great Tatsuya Nakadai appears in both Yojimbo and Sanjuro as a major antagonist – he is the gun-toting Unosuke in the first film, and the younger upstart samurai Hanbei in the second – but Sanjuro is the first film I really noticed him in, back when I was first getting into classic Japanese cinema. Watching Sanjuro was the first time I had to pause the movie and Google this amazing actor, whereupon I learned he was – and is, since he is still with us at the ripe old age of 90 – just as great a star as Mifune himself, if a bit more chameleonic. I absolutely adore his work as Hanbei here; he has this amazing shit-eating grin, combined with a wry little fire burning behind his eyes. Hanbei is a man hopelessly in love with the game, an Icarus flying too close to the sun, right until the moment he gets slashed in half. Nakadai’s composure in that finale, keeping his performance going even as a then-unprecedented amount of fake blood exploded from his chest, is rightly legendary – the moment doesn’t work without him selling the effect.
That moment – the painfully slow stand-off exploding into a startling geyser of blood – launched a thousand similar scenes in movies, TV shows, animation, and video games, and is the shining pinnacle of these two films, a masterclass in pacing, patience, and audacity that, for all its influence, has never lost an iota of its power. That it comes at the end of a film that is so pervasively light on its feet feels both appropriate and surprising. Mifune’s final walk into the sunset is sadder than any other moment in either film – these silly samurai games can, in the end, only lead to one horrible outcome, Sanjuro acknowledges as he leaves another corpse behind – but like the young samurai watching in awe, our initial impulse is to celebrate. Mifune admonishes us as much as he does his younger counterparts; the fun can only last so long, and of course, Kurosawa and Mifune would only make two more films together (High and Low and Red Beard, both masterpieces, neither remotely like these two adventures) before ceasing their historic partnership. It was, like Sanjuro himself, glorious while it lasted.
NEXT WEEK: We continue a month devoted to looking at classics from the ‘Golden Age’ of Japanese cinema with a piece on Yasujirō Ozu’s TOKYO STORY.
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