Anssi Vartiainen A lonely mercenary arrives in town, finding it torn between two feuding families. Seeing a chance to earn a few coins he decides to sell his services as a killer to the highest bidder. In the process he ends up escalating the feud, turning the families against each other even worse than they already were. Sound familiar? That might be because this Akira Kurosawa film was remade in the West a few years later. Starring Clint Eastwood, the film was named A Fistful of Dollars. Perhaps you've heard of it.Keeping that in mind, the film is a fascinating watch. So many of the idiosyncrasies of spaghetti westerns can be explained by the fact that ultimately they're based on Japanese samurai films. The lonely, wandering hero. The gruff antihero that still ends up saving the day. The corruptibility of officials.It's also to be kept in mind that this is an Akira Kurosawa film. And quite honestly one of the best ones I've seen from him. The setting of the town is not all that big. A single street with a few important buildings, really. Yet it is used beautifully and the viewer becomes intimately familiar with it throughout the course of the film. Full props to Toshiro Mifune as well, playing the lead character, the cold and lethal ronin, who still hides a beating heart beneath his tattered clothes. One of his defining roles for a reason.Is the film without flaws? Not entirely. The musical cues are sometimes less than subtle, which is actually pretty common with Kurosawa, and the fight scenes, inventive though as they are, lack certain polish. A sword might miss by several hand-widths, yet the opponent still screams and falls. Small touches like that.Still, the story and the characters are so great here that I'm fully comfortable calling this better than A Fistful of Dollars. Not by much, but it does beat that classic. And that's saying something.

mr_irishcaptain First of the Yojimbo/Sanjuro set, Many of the shots which would be used in a Fistful of Dollars the start of Dollars trilogy. The Samurai walking in the town with the dog with severed hand in his mouth puts tone of the whole film in that one scene. This film has many more and overall you should this influential action masterpiece.

grantss A samurai, Sanjuro Kuwabatake, finds himself in a town run by two warlords, Ushitora and Seibei. The town is a den of inequity, not only due to the warlords and their hired thugs, but due to the hordes of gamblers that inhabit it. The samurai sets out to rid the town of all these pestilences, his plan being to play the two warlords off against each other.Excellent movie by famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Clever, unpredictable plot with some great twists along the way. Good character development and some great action scenes. The only blemish is that it is difficult to figure out which characters fit into the mix in what way. This is often heightened by Kurosawa introducing an important character out of the blue, with no background. They're often linked to the story via another character, a character who we also don't know much about, if anything at all. So some of the character-specific stories were a bit hard to follow.An influential movie in that Sergio Leone used this as inspiration for his spaghetti westerns - a Fistful of Dollars in particular. You can see it in some of the fight scenes: the slow, deliberate build-up, the music the Mexican standoff. A Fistful of Dollars is even regarded as a remake of Yojimbo.

Jackson Booth-Millard I had sen this Japanese film listed in the television schedules a number of times, always on the same channel, Film4, it is rated five out of five stars by critics, so I decided it was definitely worth a watch, directed by Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai). Basically samurai Sanjuro Kuwabatake (Toshirô Mifune) finds himself in the middle of a Japanese village with feuding, neither side is particularly honorable, but Sanjuro is hungry and impoverished, so he finds work as a bodyguard (or Yojimbo) for a silk merchant Tazaemon (Kamatari Fujiwara). Sanjuro chooses over a job working for sake brewer Tokuemon (Takashi Shimura), but he pretends to work for him, as part of a plan for them to tear each other apart, but he is eventually arrested for treachery. Sanjuro escapes in time to see the two warring sides fight to the finish, the plan all along was to create and restore peace, Sanjuro leaves the village for further exploits, the character returned in the sequel titled Sanjuro a year later. Also starring Eijirô Tôno as Gonji the Tavern Keeper, Seizaburô Kawazu as Seibê the Brothel Operator, Isuzu Yamada as Orin, Hiroshi Tachikawa as Yoichiro and Susumu Fujita as Homma the Instructor Who Skips Town. The performances are fine, and the direction as always is great from Kurosawa, I will admit I did not pay the fullest attention to everything going on, and it did get confusing at times, but the 19th century feel is authentic, and the sword skill and fight scenes catch your eye, I can see some reasons why it would get full marks from critics, it did influence A Fistful of Dollars and the "spaghetti western" genre, a worthwhile adventure. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Costume Design. Very good!