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Blast From The Past Review: Yojimbo
Image Credit: Toho
Loading...When I check on Letterboxd, it seems that from the past one hundred years, the decade from which I have watched the fewest movies is the 1960’s. Which makes sense; I have a weird bias against that decade. Everyone was obsessed with The Beatles, and I guess I just don’t get it.
But according to Letterbox, prior to today, the only 1960’s movies I had logged were Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Italian Job, and The Horrors Of Spider Island, the last of which I only logged because I watched that episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
(Yes, I log the movies I watched because of MST3K; don’t you?)
I recently got access to watch Akira Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo, though, and after having previously seen Seven Samuraiand Ran, I knew I had to give it a shot. And what do you know? It’s from 1961! So it adds another tick to my most neglected decade.
Yojimbo tells the story of a nameless ronin samurai who finds himself in the middle of a war between two opposing gangs in a small town. He is hungry and tired as he enters the town, and gets the backstory of the gang leaders, Seibei and Ushitora, from the town restauranteur. Deciding to save the town from the violence being inflicted upon them, the samurai immediately begins concocting a plan on how to defeat the gangs.
And from there, we get almost surprisingly little action, as the samurai’s plans are quite often based on sneakery and subterfuge. But don’t worry! There ends up being plenty of sword strikes if that’s what you are here for.
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
+ Akira Kurosawa staple leading man Toshiro Mifune is a great lead in this as the classic actor he is. He has this great sense of pride and this aura of infallibility that pays off when he finally faces peril in the third act and gets his ass beat. He goes from hero to zero very quickly, and he plays both aspects supremely well. It’s hard to go from initially playing this proud, seemingly unbeatable hard-ass, and then to suddenly become so vulnerable when he is finally defeated.
He really does fantastic work all across the movie as he has in every Kurosawa production I have seen him in. He’s a little John Wayne Of The East in that, from what I have seen, he certainly has and became a shtick, but when you do it as well as he did, I guess it’s allowable. Even through the language barrier I had with this film, his charisma shined for days.
+ There are some fantastic shots in this, from just the way certain scenes are framed to some extended one-cut takes. Kurosawa is the master of his craft as usual here.
There is one shot in particular that wowed me, and it is of Mifune’s ronin samurai having climbed up a small tower to sit above the fray as the villainous armies of the two warring gangs make their way to the center of town. It’s shot upward at the protagonist as the armies hesitantly come into frame to face off with each other. Just gorgeous stuff.
And there is stuff like that throughout the film. And the one-cuts; I always marvel at those. There aren’t any here that are ridiculously long or anything, but Kurosawa still manages to fit in a lot of action between edits, and I appreciate how much work that is for everyone involved. High caliber direction here!
– The music is a little overdramatic and too loud. It took me out of moments of the film instead of keeping me immersed in it. It’s a good score, sure, but it’s a bit repetitive and overplayed. And I’m not kidding when I say that, at least in the version I had access to, the music is substantially louder than everything else sound-wise. Not “constantly screwing with the volume” louder or anything, but… I guess I have the belief that music should be ambient and flow behind a scene rather than jump out in front of it and feel like it’s waving its arms at me to get my attention. It’s a minor Down, but there it is.
– I know the movie is 60+ years old, but the plot is very basic. There is an unflappably good protagonist who wanders into town and decides he is going to fix everyone’s problems. There are two different gang bosses competing for control over the town, and they are both mustache-twirlingly evil. All of their minions are unquestionably and sinisterly loyal to their overbosses. Nothing here really makes you think or consider anything. It’s straight Heroism Vs Villainy.
And I get this was still 1961, and this was kind of the order of the day for a lot of movies, but fiction as a whole had been deeper than that for ages by the time this came around, so “being old” doesn’t feel like an excuse. Shakespeare was writing nuanced characters in the 1500’s. And I don’t think it’s wildly unfair to The Bard to compare another legend like Kurosawa to him.
