Retrospective Film Review

Yojimbo (1961) • 60 Years Later

A crafty ronin comes to a town divided by two criminal gangs and decides to play them against each other to free the town.

Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo is 60 years old, and audiences are still drawn to this classic of the jidaigeki genre. They may come to it for different reasons, but most will find satisfaction in its quirky mash-up of styles; mixing familiar tropes from period drama, gangster, film noir, political allegory, western, satire, and dark comedy. It’s also a star vehicle, showcasing memorable performances from two of Japan’s great actors, with Toshirô Mifune in the lead as ‘the samurai’ and Tatsuya Nakadai as ‘the gunfighter’. It’s probably best known outside Japan as the inspiration behind Sergio Leone’s seminal spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964) which was a not-so-loose remake. As was another classic of that genre, Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966).

Interestingly, that east-west influence was part of a cycle that perhaps started decades earlier with Red Harvest, a 1929 novel by Dashiell Hammett about a detective who plays rival…