"That's not your name, you're just reading labels on stuff": Yojimbo

Corey has been trying to get me to watch Yojimbo ever since we started dating. I'd always been reluctant to do so, as I knew it only as the film A Fistful of Dollars is based on, and the former is the only Clint Eastwood western I really, deeply dislike. But, after having become better versed in the works of Akira Kurosawa, and having watched Sanjuro, a sequel of sorts, I finally made the right choice.

Yojimbo (1961) is the story of a ronin samurai (Toshiro Mifune!), unemployed due to the end of a dynasty and the new emergence of a middle class, who now lives an itinerant and somewhat aimless life. Stopping at a small farmhouse to get a drink of water, he encounters a young man arguing with his parents, shouting that he's going to go to town where he can live well and die young instead of living a long life of poverty. As our hero gets his drink, the boys parents lament about how the town is overrun by gamblers and gangs, and accuse the samurai of being drawn to the smell of blood. In town, he quickly assesses the situation, befriending an old inkeeper who tells him about the local turf war. Brothel owner Seibei and his domineering wife appointed the town's puppet officer of the law. Rival crime boss Ushitora and his family are the more physically violent gang, and appointed the town's puppet mayor. Basically, it's a good old-fashioned turf war. The innkeeper, Gonji, assumes this explanation of events will prompt the samurai to be on his way. Gonji is quite mistaken. The samurai sees an opportunity: he believes he can, through plotting and machinations, kill or cause the death of the crime lords and their seconds, thus saving the innocents of the town, and get them to pay him to do it, because he's in dire poverty and relies on the mercy of others to get his sporadic meals. If you've seen A Fistful of Dollars, you kind of know where this will go, except that final confrontations - and the heroes - of the two are quite different. Kurosawa didn't need a 'kill the hero' fake-out to create drama and tension (something I don't think those sort of fake-outs ever create, but that's beside the point).

Yojimbo is one of the greatest films I've ever seen, something I seem to say every time I watch a Kurosawa flick for the first time. He was a master of establishing atmosphere and character by the unexpected device of using the camera to follow said character from behind, in a close-up, hand-held fashion, and the opening of Yojimbo, employing both this method and a hero musical theme which can best be described in technical film terminology as "kick-ass", is the greatest minimalist introduction I've ever seen - it tells you almost everything there is to know about the samurai by following the back of his head. Absolutely mind-blowing. Yojimbo also has its occasional fleeting touches of humour, such as when Ushitora asks the samurai for his name, in a scene homaged by Dave Foley's The Wrong Guy and repeated in Sanjuro. But what's most interesting about Yojimbo, and Sanjuro, which is a "further tales of..." rather than a sequel in the traditional sense, is the hero's character growth. Though he remains the same man at his fundaments, he is changed by the events of Yojimbo. He has changed and grown further by the opening of Sanjuro, and even more so by the end of that film. As ironic as this is to say about a film nearly fifty years old, it's refreshing. It's also very effective.

The reason I was so bored and unimpressed by A Fistful of Dollars was because The Man With No Name doesn't exactly have a huge moral high ground over the baddies. The hero of Yojimbo is a man with honour, and not that killer's creed/anti-hero brand of honour. He is a man motivated by goodness and mercy, and the desire to do right and see right done. He also happens to be rather crass, and unconcerned (even, perhaps, disgusted) by social mores when those mores do more harm than good, like in the scene where he rescues the family. Where I don't find this translated well to Dollars is the fact that there is a world of difference between an anti-hero and a righteous man with a vulgar streak. I find it straight-up strange that Sergio Leone translated this noble character into a cold-hearted, mercenary bastard whose only redeeming characteristic is a soft spot for the innocent and oppressed. For a Few Dollars More is ludicrously entertaining, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly remains one of the greatest westerns ever conceived, but there are no illusions contained therein as to the nature of their heros character.

Yojimbo, starring Toshiro Mifune and directed by Akira Kurosawa, runs 110 minutes, black-and-white, subtitles, blah blah blah. And, oh yeah, it's a masterpiece! It's also an action film! You'd have to exert effort to be bored by Yojimbo. It's great way to spend an evening, or a snowy Canadian afternoon.

Say...it's snowing right now!