Yojimbo 12A

Yojimbo tells the story of a masterless samurai (Toshiro Mifune), who arrives in a small town in the desolate countryside, where two competing crime lords are fighting for supremacy. To rid the terror-stricken village of corruption, the samurai turns the war between the clans to his own advantage.

While Kurosawa noted that a main inspiration for the film was Hollywood Noir classic The Glass Key (1942), Yojimbo would be remade twice for American audiences, first in 1964 as Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, and again in 1996 in Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing. Shot by cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who photographed Rashomon (1950) and Ozu’s Floating Weeds (1959), Yojimbo is considered to be the most visually accomplished of Kurosawa’s films and an exhilarating genre-twist of a story.