Movie Review - Yojimbo
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1961 / 110 Minutes / Not Rated
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz
“Yojimbo” is a totally different genre of film from any that I am used to or have seen before. It is an “Eastern”. And it is extremely cool.
What, you will undoubtedly ask, is an “Eastern”? Has Dale finally gone off the deep end? Was Dale ever in the shallow end of the pool to begin with? I can only answer one of these questions (though, were I to hazard a guess, I would say that the definition of “Normal” and myself were never more than casual acquaintances). As far as I see it: an “Eastern” bears many similarities to a Western. Except that the characters drink sake, eat with chopsticks, look cool in ponytails (no white man has ever quite done that one) and carry samurai swords instead of pistols. The characters deal with ideas like honor, loyalty, and those old saws “right” and “wrong”. In this way, they are a lot like the characters of your standard “Western”. Instead of cowboy hats, they wear kimonos and robes. The hookers look more like geishas than like Miss Kitty from “Gunsmoke”. And in place of riding a horse, everyone just hoofs it.
The hero of this film has no name and, also like Clint Eastwood, he is one of the coolest men in all cinema. Toshiro Mifune plays a samurai who is now left to wander from one place to another with no real agenda. He goes where the wind blows. At the beginning of the film, he comes to a fork in the road. He throws a stick into the air and, when it lands, the direction in which it points is the track he takes.
The stick must have been a diving rod for scum, because he winds up in a small village in which everyone is either a coffin maker, a warlord, or a gambler and most of the gamblers are dead. Two war lords are fighting for control of the town. They prosper and fight. Everyone else either joins sides or ends up dead. Most of the time they do both. Our hero, or antihero, is now faced with the dilemma of which side to join up with in order to make some yen. He can’t quite decide, apparently, so he has fun in joining with one side and then the other, never quite joining up but just helping them out and flirting with the idea of taking sides.
Toshiro Mifune is very captivating in this film, not to mention the coolest man ever to wield a samurai sword. He seems like an amoral fiend, yet there are flashes of decency here. He has two friends in town and a lot of enemies, yet there is always a smile mere inches from his face. I truly love the scene in which the men he has sided with are in a room plotting his betrayal and murder and he sits outside the door, listening and taking it all in with a smile on his face. You can just tell that this is not the first time he has been in this situation. There is hardly a situation in this movie, however, where he does not manage to keep his cool. He is a cool character, but he does get emotional. He is a bit mean, and yet he is also the nicest guy in town. He’s a complicated man and I loved every minute of it. Mifune is great here, as good as a certain Eastwood fellow was in the movie “A Fistful of Dollars” which was based on this one.
The plot of this film is ingenious, with allegiances being made and broke and deals being struck and torn asunder at the seeming drop of a chopstick. Despite the fact that I had seen this story done twice before (I saw “A Fistful of Dollars” and even the largely regrettable “Last Man Standing” before I saw this one, even though this was the granddaddy of them all) I was still riveted by it and not quite sure what was going to happen next. I was hooked, in other words. By the effortless direction, the great editing (the wipe technique is put to marvelous use here, and it has never been done better) and the wide angle panorama of the events and the photography. This film is a remarkable meditation on what it means to have honor, what part morals play, and what sort of a man it takes to kill for a living.
It’s also got some extremely exciting action and sword fights in it, as well as a sneaky sense of humor. If you are serious about movies, you can’t go without seeing “Yojimbo”. A lot has been said about Akira Kurosawa and, judging by the strength of this picture, none of it was exaggerated.
