Yojimbo/Sanjuro
Studio: Criterion Collection
Rated: NOT RATED
Release Date: 2007-01-23
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Eijiro Tono (II), Kamatari Fujiwara (II), Takashi Shimura, Seizaburo Kawazu
Director: Akira Kurosawa
WorkNameSort: Yojimbo/Sanjuro
Want to know a secret? Great films, even when they’re ‘classicsâ?�, are supposed to be fun. And a great director like Akira Kurosawa might be able to lay the profundity on like peanut butter whenever he gets the urge, but he’s also no slouch at creating a popcorny good time. That’s even more apparent after viewing Yojimbo and Sanjuro, Kurosawa’s early-’60s crowd-pleasing (and critic-pleasing) samurai films, now reissued together in a handsome box set by the Criterion Collection.
Kurosawa didn’t invent the genre of ‘jidaigekiâ?� (samurai period piece) but he cross-pollinated it with the Western and installed his antihero muse, Toshiro Mifune, as its scrubby, surly epicenter. The resulting brew of murky virtue, morbid wit, devilish swordplay and aesthetic cunning in Yojimbo proved so successful the Toho studio practically begged Kurosawa to make the sequel, Sanjuro, the ‘sassy kid brotherâ?� (as critic Michael Sragow writes in the DVD’s accompanying notes) to the universally well-regarded first film.
These cinematic bookends linger on the retina not only because of Kurosawa’s ingenuity as a director, but because of the synergy between him and his leading actor. Mifune is effortlessly raw as Sanjuro, the slobby alley cat of a warrior whose bulk and Brando-esque bellyscratching disguises a formidable lethality. It’s easy to see how Mifune’s characterization subsequently threaded its DNA through hard-bitten
Occidental rogues like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name and the X-Men’s Wolverine. ‘I’ll get paid for killing,â?� Sanjuro intones at one point. ‘And this town is full of men who are better off dead.â?� Only a guy this tough could prove the adage ‘Don’t bring a knife to a gun fightâ?� isn’t as ironclad as it seems.
Films this immortal deserve the deluxe treatment, and once again Criterion hasn’t cut corners. The disc’s digital transfer is crisp and spotless, with dense blacks and variegated grays that show off Kurosawa’s masterful flat-focus compositions. The subtitles offer pleasantly colloquial translations, and Masaru Sato’s formidable score (equal parts traditional Japanese music and brassy Hollywood bombast) swells beautifully in Dolby Digital 3.0. Even the packaging feels good in the hands ‘ the pages of the accompanying booklets are printed with the trompe l’oeil grain of fine paper, and each disc is emblazoned with a sly shogunate-style crest teasing at each movie’s denouement (crossed pistols for Yojimbo, red and white blossoms for Sanjuro). Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince adds his insights about each film’s deeper thematic points on the commentary track, but the two Toho-commissioned documentaries about the making of each film are easily the standouts among the DVD extras. ‘A truly good movie is really enjoyable, too,â?� says Kurosawa at the beginning of one of the documentaries. See, told you so.
This article appears in Jan 31 – Feb 6, 2007.