Men of Action: Yojimbo (Dir Akira Kurosawa, 1h 50m, 1961)

1946. A Tokyo ravaged by war. At the centre of Chiyoda, the political cultural centre of Japan 's capital, alongside the legendary Budokan, the Diet, the Imperial Palace, stands the headquarters of Toho. Within a decade, the twin assault of a hundred foot radioactive reptile and a septet of samurai will blast out of this nondescript studio and arrive in cinemas across the world. Within three decades, they'll be responsible for the sudden arrival of anime, a reverse kurofune, a reverse Perry, rolling out of Japan and changing cinema forever. By the turn of the 21st Century, Toho will sport the most famous monster in cinema, and the films of Akira Kurosawa, a veritable kings ransom before we even talk about Ghibli, Akira, and the like. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. For in one of the rooms in Toho's Chiyoda offices, a twenty-six year old man is raging.

It's part of an audition, the young man is down on his luck, a single acting credit to his name, and surly, and seems barely restrained, a wild animal set loose in a nondescript room. He's, in polite terms, rather pissed off the judges, who are, as the actor will later recount in the late 1980s, about to kick him out. But one of them is absolutely transfixed by the performance, leaning forward in his seat. Akira Kurosawa will later write that he found this actor "as frightening as watching a wounded or trapped savage beast trying to break loose". This wildness will be come positively legendary, that mad glint in his eye or the iconic positively feral grin of triumph that will become the shorthand for his most famous role. For the first time, Kurosawa and this man exchange glances, before, with a scowl, Toshiro Mifune flings himself down in a chair, and stares down the jury. Akira Kurosawa has found his muse, a man that will appear in sixteen films, between 1947 and 1965, and become the shorthand for the samurai, the wanderer, in cinema, propel both of them into the cinematic stratosphere, and change cinema forever.

I love Toshiro Mifune. Hell, I love a hell of a number of actors, from Danish tour-de-force Mads Mikkelsen, a man who has, like few others in Hollywood, a grounded sensibility, and a presence in even the most cinematically lightweight pictures he appears in, to the no-nonsense, if largely self-portraying Kurt Russell and Clint Eastwood, to his polar opposite, the chameleonic Daniel Day Lewis, who utterly disappears beneath the skin of a role. Above them all towers Mifune, a man as capable of playing the ultimate political strategist in Shogun, to the irresponsible Mexican peasant in Ánimas Trujano, to the comedic foil in Spielberg's 1941 to the early turn as charming (and quintessentially photogenic) thief Ejima, in Snow Trail. Even outside his most famous roles, in the increasing number of cameos and bitparts in Western co productions, and in his increasing role as an elderstatesman of Japanese cinema, Mifune brings it all.

Mifune, though, for millions, means one thing. The samurai. Mifune's face, undeniably, is the first that comes to mind when you think about this staple of Japanese cinema; a stern, often bearded visage, a drawn sword, more often than not the masterless, wandering rootless ronin, without history, or, more often than not, name. Between his first samurai feature, Rashomon (1951), in which Mifune's bandit is at turns calculating villain, dishonourable brigand, and fragile, falliable human, and absolutely key in the film being the first major post-war feature to find popularity outside of Japan, and his final, the colossal ensemble piece, The Fall of Ako Castle (1978), Mifune practically re-established what that figure meant in Japanese cinema. And nowhere else is his singular take on the iconic Japanese staple better seen than in 1961's Yojimbo.

Yojimbo, in broad brushstrokes, is the tale of a wandering samurai, (Mifune), who comes across a village torn down the middle by two warring factions and their battle for control of the local gambling racket. At the head of both mobs are rival figures; brothel owner, Seibei, and his former lieutenant, Ushitora, with both sides sporting a rogue's gallery of ruffians and grotesques, including Ushitora's duo of enforcers, Inokichi and the colossal Kannuki. Into the chaos of the village, on the verge of chaos, so enters the wandering ronin, setting up shop at the local inn, with Gonji (Eijirō Tōno), quickly explaining the situation, the warring faction, and the ineffectual mayor. Seeing no end to the conflict in site, so the ronin decides that he, slowly but surely, must put an end to these warring sides himself.

What follows, thus, is the ronin, who dubs himself Kuwabatake Sanjuro, changing sides, first supporting Seibei by, in the film's first, and blindingly fast fight scene, killing three of Ushitora's men, but, following Sanjuro overhearing Seibei and his wife plotting to kill him, and abandons Seibei's men just before pitched battle. His hope that this will wipe out both sides is shortlived, as a local government official appears, and both sides, reluctant as they are to fight, are able to beat a hasty retreat. Whilst Yojimbo quickly tracks down the cause of the official's arrival, the murder of another local official at the hands of two of Ushitora's men, his role twists once more, as he delivers the men to Seibei, only to find himself in a twisted web of plots, with captives on both sides further complicating Yojimbo's role in the battles, until he finally makes a decisive move to protect an innocent family, and after a brutal beating is left for dead.

What follows is a bloodletting, with Seibei and his family massacred, largely offscreen, leaving the brutish Ushitora, and his violent, gunwielding son, Unosuke (a perfectly wrought foil to Yojimbo, played by veteran Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai), in charge of the village, and with a single foe left for Yojimbo to best. His return from the veritable grave, being smuggled out of the town by the coffin-maker and the figure of Gonji, and his return, to rescue the one man in the village that he clearly has some affection for is a brutally, and yet cathartically produced, and yet utterly one-sided fight in which Mifune barely breaks stride as he cuts down the remaining bandits and criminals, before, once more, the ronin takes to the road, his work done, to reappear in 1962's sequel, Sanjuro.

Yojimbo is many things. It is Kurosawa at his most accessible, and certainly compared to Seven Samurai, the great heavy-hitter of Kurosawa's Jidaigeki films, it is close to a standard action movie, rapidly paced, and with the director's usual cinematic vision when it comes to the pitched battles and individual fights, the camera, as with Seven Samurai, often plunging into the action, or following a single combatant through the melee. We see this several times-the confrontation between the two forces hems swords in the front of the frame, whilst, as the chaos of the infighting gathers pace, we see the camera swing through scenes of panic, from the brewery, where sake flows despite the teeming figures, and the massacre of the Seibei house is equally gripping and claustrophobic.

It is also, undeniably, the Kurosawa film that left the biggest mark on action cinema; and yet, it is undeniably the film in which Kurosawa's love of westerns, of John Ford films, and detective novels, refracts back. Mifune is the lone gunman strolling into town, a larger than life, seemingly unstoppable figure, with his own moral centre. Moreover, the cinematic language of 30s and 40s westerns clearly colours Yojimbo, from the way that Mifune towers into shot, or peers through windows, and the duels that bookend each major sequence are shot and edited like the gun duels of the Old West. Hardly surprising, then,that the the film's influence over the depiction of samurai fullstop is unrivalled in Japanese cinema, but, there is, of course, the shadow of A Fistful of Dollars, a film that essentially picks up the entire film wholesale, down to lifting a great number of the film's shots wholesale. This quickly lead to Kurosawa's immortal putdown that Sergio Leone had "made a fine movie, but it is my movie", and 10% of the film's takings ending up going to Toho and the slighted director.

But, whilst Eastwood's first turn as "The Man With No Name" is a solid performance, compared to Mifune's masterclass, it is almost hopelessly wooden. Mifune is the glue that holds together Kurosawa's films at his best, and he is at the height of his powers in Yojimbo, matching unstoppable, and frankly, never bettered machismo, a swift blade, a sense of justice, with a laid back, almost insolent sense to himself. The Man With No Name may well be Yojimbo transferred to the West, but he's an altogether more flappable figure, and his financially driven, braggard sensibility makes the character a pale imitation of the original, only reaching his potential in the only Dollars film not based on a Kurosawa film, the titanically scaled The Good, the Bad and the Ugly..

Mifune is solid, unstoppable, and yet his arrival in the village is prefaced with a man after food and drink before he endevours in daring do-the only people he truly risks his neck for are a family caught up in the chaos and the innkeeper with whom he sets up a friendship. Where Eastwood is droll, and utterly humourless, an archetypal tough guy, Mifune spends the first battle between Seibei and Ushitora's forces perched on a watchtower, his role seemingly complete as he settles in to watch the two forces massacre each other. We see him wander through Seibei's business, to eavesdrop on him and his wife as a huddle of prostitutes watch on, we see him battered and bruised and bloodied, but still commentating, in a darkly comic moment, on the denoument of the Seibei family massacre behind him.

More than anything, though, Mifune is one of my favourite actors because, together with Kurosawa, he subverts the entire samurai genre; it's startling to find that the actor perhaps most linked with samurai, in the upteen appearances as gruff one-note honourable warriors, only played one twice with his greatest director. The rest are either men masquerading as them (Seven Samurai's Kikuchiyo, who steals the entire film as the mid-point between village and samurai), or having long since left that life as a blade for hire. There is, above everything else, for all Mifune's toughness, something wonderfully subversive about the way that he plays perhaps his most famous role, as a man having long since stepped out of the old systems of the feudal era into the world of the modern man, and tricking the villagers, manipulating them into annihilating each other for the greater good of the village they rule over, because they are mistaken that he still clings to them.

The final clash, between Yojimbo and Unosuke, is this in minature; the modern samurai, fighting with his traditional sword, against the traditional villager armed with the most modern of weapons; one is practically the modern Japan in short, the other is a strange, and almost deliberately political sense of an outdated world being put, appropriately enough, to the sword. Yojimbo, above all, is Japan's greatest director, and Japan's greatest actor at the height of their power, creating between them one of cinema's greatest archetypes. Between Kurosawa and Mifune, the nameless avenger, the righter of wrongs without a history and without a home stalks into cinema, and reinvents what we see in our action heroes, and in his wake, in the long shadow of one of cinema's original heroes, come multitudes. But none, perhaps, will ever live up to Mifune himself. Who could?

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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