(THE BODYGUARD)
**** (out of ****)
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Takashi Shimura, Eijiro Tono, Isuzu Yamada, Yoko Tsukasa, Daisuke Kato, Atsushi Watanabe, and Hiroshi Tachikawa
Directed by Akira Kurosawa & written by Ryuzo Kikushima and Akira Kurosawa, based on the novel “Red Harvest” by Dashiell Hammet
1961
110 min NR (should be PG or PG13)
Most of us could probably hold our own in a fistfight with Keanu, Orlando, and Cruise. But Toshiro Mifune exudes an aura of being able to walk right off the screen and pound the living crap out of us if only we weren’t so unworthy of his time. He enters “Yojimbo” with his back to us, using the cockiest of cocky strides. He is uninterested in what we may think of him, and his movements throughout the film are expansive and vaguely jaunty, matched by the soundtrack’s jarring, almost jazzy low clarinet. As much as “Yojimbo” belongs to director Akira Kurosawa, it also belongs to its lead actor, who starred in several of the Sensai of Cinema’s films, including “Throne of Blood,” “Rashomon,” and “The Seven Samurai.”
Unless they were mistranslated or the addition of some sloppy American distributor, the title cards at the beginning of “Yojimbo,” while Mifune is walking his walk, are very illuminating and colored my entire reading of the film. They describe how the rise of the Japanese middle class in the 1860s caused the decline of the most recent imperial dynasty, leaving many samurai without masters or a purpose. This explains it all: the wandering ronin Sanjuro (the mighty Mifune) is out to cut him up some bourgeoisie.
Sure, the movie calls them “gamblers.” But we hardly ever see them gambling. They are the middle class, the townsfolk, out to buy and sell, out to reduce everything to its monetary value. When we first hear of the two warring clans of “gamblers,” it is when Sanjuro crosses paths with a farm boy who is abandoning his country parents in favor of a life in the town. Are his parents distraught about him taking up a life of crime, or is it just the age-old and mournful refrain of farm parents whose children are seduced by the glamour of the big city?
“Yojimbo” belongs to that lineage of tales whose latest offspring include not just “The Last Samurai”—in which one way of life in Japan does battle with another—but “The Lord of the Rings” as well, in which the pastoral and the industrial face off. Among Sanjuro’s many adversaries is a man armed with a six-shooter. Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” sends many confused messages about the country flat-out defeating the city, all the while beating us over the head with technological effects that only the most industrialized world could produce. But Kurosawa’s film is a more complex and mature examination of the reactionary’s glee at seeing the nouveau riche suffer, as well the price of his revenge.
From the moment Sanjuro enters the town where the clans are at war—from opposite ends of the same street, by the way—he dangles in front of them the one thing they cannot have: his honor. He taunts them by pretending to sell it and his sword over and over again, but he keeps neither their allegiance nor their money. He throws their coins away or gives them to others, as if to say “this thing that I once gave away for free to my master, you cannot even buy it.” Because they are without honor, the clans are revealed to be comprised of tough-talking cowards. “Yojimbo” includes a great scene that I can’t imagine a modern big-budget costume epic being brave enough to include: two giant gangs of toughs confront each other in the street, swords shining, and then are too afraid to fight.
But “Yojimbo” also has that element of so many great movies and stories: a conflict of desires. We come to see things Sanjuro’s way, mostly because he’s just so cool. But he is also deceitful, vicious, and has little regard for human life. He kills two toughs and wounds a third in the middle of the street just to prove his worth to the clans. “Two coffins,” he tells the coffin-maker before glancing over his shoulder at the wounded man. “Better make that three.” We crave revenge, but we also acknowledge its futility and are disappointed when our (his) vengeance is finally enacted. When Sanjuro finally does get to watch one clan obliterate the other, it involves parents being killed in front of their son, while others are cut down begging for their lives. He is filled with remorse at the work of his hands, and his final statement before clapping the dirt off those hands is “things will be a lot quieter around here now.”
Does Kurosawa have something to say about the rapid industrialization of post-World War II Japan? Who knows. But the very fact that the industrialization of the 1860s can be applied again a century later illustrates “Yojimbo’s” longevity. We are all perpetually in a cycle of finding comfort, morality, and order, only to abandon it all to greedily consume a newer, comparatively more reckless way of life.
Page two of “Yojimbo.” Back to home.