Yojimbo (1961)

Not rated, but there's some pretty brutal stuff in here for an Akira Kurosawa movie from 1961.  It's not overly gory, compared to other movies like Lone Wolf and Cub or anything, but there are moments where I forgot how mildly intense the movie gets.  Like, the town establishes how corrupt it is by having a dog gnawing on a severed hand when the samurai enters the town.  Also, there's more than no swearing in this movie.  Like, a decent amount.  There's also some sex work going on, but it's really downplayed.

DIRECTOR:  Akira Kurosawa

It's a very Kurosawa Christmas!  I almost wrote about this yesterday.  I think I hit almost none of my goals on Christmas day itself, but I wanted to keep up because now I'm up to my neck in catch-up writing to do.  I lead a very hard life of self-imposed goals that no one really cares about.  But guess what?  I finally get to write about Yojimbo, a movie that kind of knocked my socks off the first time I watched it.  (Despite not watching it again until yesterday.) 

I kind of jumped the line on watching Yojimbo.  I was going to slowly get to Yojimbo by spine number originally.  It's a pretty early one, so I thought that it wouldn't be a problem.  But I've been so backlogged in my stupid algorithm for figuring out which movie to watch next that I accidentally had to insert Yojimbo earlier than planned.  (When I say that I "had to do something", none of that is true.  I don't have to do something.  I just fill my life with self-imposed goals that mean ultimately nothing.) See, I actually got to the disc in the Zatoichi boxset that has Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, a movie I've been incredibly jazzed to watch.  In the dregs of some of the Zatoichi movies, I had this light at the end of the tunnel knowing that I would get to see something else with Yojimbo, even if the character's name is "Sanjuro." 

And for a hot minute, I was wondering why I liked this movie so long ago. I mean, it's Akira Kurosawa.  I'm predisposed to liking Kurosawa in the same way that Hitchcock kind of gets a pass from me.  I was worried that Zatoichi had ruined the samurai movie for me. (The judai-geki, if you will...) I mean, I'm now seeing a lot of the formula playing out in these movies.  Samurai times were a times where small bosses and lords tyrannized little towns and it took a samurai with a heart of gold to murder the heck out of everyone before moving on somewhere else.  Now, for the first part of the movie, a lot of the movie played out exactly like a Zatoichi film. I know that it's Zatoichi that's borrowing from Yojimbo.  But it didn't change the fact that I've seen this set up before.   At least I was liking the characters.  Like the crotchety Gonji, the tavern keeper?  (Okay, I had to look that up on IMDB.)  He's great.  Considering that Zatoichi is the only charismatic one in his movies, it's great that this one has side characters that are way more likable.  I also love that Kurosawa is completely unafraid to play with archetypes (almost to the point of being caricatures).  It's silly, but it's also incredibly fun.

And once Sanjuro starts unpacking his plan, the movie becomes kind of lit.  I keep thinking that the story is almost over, Kurosawa keeps adding things that makes Sanjuro's life crap.   Now, here's one thing that I kind of want people to argue with me about.  The premise of this movie is that this samurai is going to use his cryptic reputation to get these two gangs to exterminate each other and Sanjuro's going to reap the reward for it.  (The reality is that Sanjuro is doing this out of the kindness of his heart because he keeps on giving away the money that he makes off of the gangs, making him a noble hero.)   And for a lot of the movie, that really works.  I mean, he keeps on tricking these morons into almost wiping themselves out.  But, of course, gun guy shows up and ruins everything (which is a headline for most days in American newspapers) and there is an actual threat to Sanjuro, who seems to have his act together.  (Also note:  "Gun Guy" is forever going to be known as "Gun Guy" because that is his entire personality.  His name, according to IMDB, is Unosuke with the description "gunfighter.") But when Sanjuro gets wrecked, he has to abandon his plan and just slaughter everyone with a sword.  I don't mind that.  There needs to be some kind of sword fight in this movie because so much of the movie is the build up of tension that a swordfight seems to be the only release available.  My question is that "Shouldn't he have led with that?"  All this espionage and tomfoolery only got him hurt and stretched out a war that had already gone on long enough.  Why wait if you could have just sworded them all to death?  Devil's advocate?   Maybe he got them to take enough of each other out that the sword thing was possible?

But there's an interesting thing that I hope that Kurosawa wanted me to think about.  Again, Kurosawa can do no wrong for me, so I assume that the insight I have right now is entirely deliberate and I'm just being a dope.  The movie starts off with the tavern keeper giving Sanjuro free cold rice with the promise that Sanjuro will leave town as fast as he can.  The tavern keeper is sick of violence and he will do anything to end it.  When Sanjuro says that he's sticking around and that he's going to solve the town's problem, the tavern keeper is flustered.  After all, he's probably heard this before and it's just another body for his neighbor, the coffin maker, to bury.  As the story progresses, the tavern keeper warms to Sanjuro.  A lot of that is because Sanjuro is different from the other fools who have tried and failed to stop the violence.  Okay, I get that.  But over the course of the movie, Sanjuro either directly causes the death of the gangs or gets the gangs to do it themselves.  The movie ends with Sanjuro wiping out the remainder of both gangs, including Gun Guy who wants to die with his pistol in his hand.  It seems like there are only three survivors in the town.  The survivors all seem happy that the gangs are all gone.  But there's also the other shoe?  Um...three people do not make up a town.  I get the logic of celebrating the destruction of the gangs.  The gangs are evil.  Although there are only a few residents who aren't tied up in the gangs, these few deserve to stay in their homes.

But the thing to unpack is that there is death on a massive scale.  Sanjuro, through his execution of the plan, has basically wiped out everyone in a town.  Sure, they were all bad and a lot of them walked into their own demise.  But it's also weird to cheer that three people get a town all to themselves.  From what I remember of A Fistful of Dollars, the Western remake of this movie, there were lots of townspeople who were able to enjoy the town afterwards.  There were no female characters who survived the bloodshed, from what I understood.  That has to be some kind of commentary.  It's a really bittersweet ending.  In terms of stakes, the movie works really well.  I mean, Sanjuro has to be work uphill to beat all of these guys who have a foothold in this community.  But still, man!  That's a lot of people who got ripped apart.

Why do I find Yojimbo so satisfying? I mean, I won't deny that I have a soft spot for Akira Kurosawa.  I was thinking that I tend not to think of Kurosawa as necessarily a samurai director.  But he totally is, isn't he?  I mean, I tend to like his jidai-geki more than his gendai-geki, with the large exception of Ikiru.  I mean, when you put Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune together, you get something incredibly special.  I will admit that I may have put Yojimbo a bit on a pedestal.  But still, this movie absolutely slaps.  It's cool.  It makes you worry about its protagonist.  I has some of those cool elements that we get from heist movies.  Honestly, Yojimbo is great and I'm a little bummed that Zatoichi kind of took my obsession with samurai movies out of me a bit.