Yojimbo

Bluesky

Before Yojimbo there were two adaptations of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key. Akira Kurosawa took inspiration from the second adaptation and blended it with some elements from another of Hammett's novels, Red Harvest. Kurosawa's masterful synthesis doesn't stop with the script. He weaves a late Edo period samurai film, in its painstaking historic detail, into modernity. Yojimbo is the sword and the pistol. It is John Ford's expansive wild west and film noir expressionism. It is the Western movie soundtrack, Japanese instrumentation and jazz. The samurai is the scruffy, whisky soaked, hard boiled detective.

A lone ronin (Toshiro Mifune) takes the wrong turn on the road. Backtracking a little, he finds himself at a crossroads. Putting himself in the hands of fate, nature or just random chance, he throws a stick in the air. It points, he follows. Hungry and dishevelled, he arrives in a small town riven with gang violence. After deciding that the town would be better off without any of them, the nameless samurai goads the warring factions into open conflict [1]. But his plan goes awry. A horseman brings news: a magistrate will be visiting the town. The visit brings with it a pause in the violence, which will kick off again shortly. The arrival of the official is heralded by a little comic turn as the soundtrack echoes John Coltrane's Blue Train.

There is a lot of humour in Yojimbo. It is not as much in the foreground as it is in the sequel Sanjuro. The characters in the film all have identifying physical traits. It is a shortcut that allows the audience to quickly engage with them. For some of the minor parts those traits are intentionally comic. Mifune's shrugging, scratching hero has dialogue that is infused with dark deadpan humour: "... two coffins, maybe three." It's the sort of thing you'd get in an early Bond film, "Shocking. Positively shocking."

Yojimbo is unlike the conservative samurai films of its time. It is shot largely with telephoto lenses. Along with tilts and pans this gives the film an incredible sense of space and intensifies the action sequences. Rude and dishevelled, a morally complex neo noir protagonist [2], Mifune's warrior is almost the antithesis of what would be expected of a samurai hero. The real antagonist in the piece, Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), in another film could have his kimono and revolver replaced by leather jacket, hot rod and flick knife.

Yojimbo isn't exactly a remake of The Glass Key. It reforms that film into something wholly new. It is a fusion of western, film noir and political satire aimed at the political system in post war Japan. It subverts the tropes common to the samurai films of the 1950s. Yojimbo has been remade, reworked and plagiarised hundreds of times. From Hollywood to Jamaica, Bollywood to Hong Kong, and of course Italy, the narrative structure and cinematography have been remodelled and sometimes stolen shot for shot. That is testimony as to how good the original is.

[1] The hero's lack of name and the bringing of the opposing factions into open conflict are two of the elements that Yojimbo has in common with Red Harvest.

[2] Kurosawa made some of the earlier neo noirs: The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and High And Low (1963).