Film Review
Whilst
Yojimbo, one of Akira
Kurosawa's best known and most commercially successful films, appears
to be the archetypal
jidai-geki,
a lush period piece crafted with immense skill and a striking sense of
realism, it was intended by its director to serve as a bleak commentary
on the corruption and criminality that had become endemic in post-war
Japan. Kurosawa sets out to condemn not only the rise of gang
culture (the Yakuza) but also the unholy alliance between the country's
political and industrial leaders. The relentlessly dark tone of
the film sets it apart from Kurosawa's previous
jidai-geki films and reflects the
director's growing distate for the soulless consumerism that had begun
to transform Japan, debasing its cultural heritage and robbing it of a
spiritual identity.
And yet, bizarrely (given its bleak subject matter and even bleaker
subtext),
Yojimbo stands as
the funniest of Kurosawa's films. An outright black comedy, it
use humour (often outrageously) to poke fun at corrupt officials and
those who would sell their soul just to make a quick buck.
Kurosawa subverts the conventions of the
jidai-geki genre brilliantly for
comical effect, deconstructing the Samurai myth, in order to deliver a
cogent allegory on the moral decay that the director felt was
overtaking present day Japan. Unusually for Kurosawa, the film
has not one sympathetic character; everyone is out for what he or she
can get and has no redeeming features, and this includes the central
Samurai protagonist (superbly played by Kurosawa regular Toshiro
Mifune) who rejects every part of the Samurai
code, offering his services for money and behaving in an underhand
manner throughout, an obvious caricature of those
authority figures in Japanese society who had sold out for personal
gain. Kazuo Miyagawa's high contrast photography, which brings an
unbreakable mood of oppression, seediness and nihilism to the film,
reinforces the impression of a community that is degenerating into
animal savagery, a festering jungle in which only the strongest and
most ruthless will survive. Today, the film's pungent subtext is
still readily discernible - cinema has yet to come up with a more
brutally condemnatory assault on capitalism than this.
Yojimbo not only attacks the
moral climate of modern day Japan, it also dealt a decisive death blow
to a kind of film that Kurosawa loathed, the
chambara or populist Japanese
action film. Unlike the
jidai-geki,
which respected historical accuracy and had a high art content, the
chambara gave a totally distorted view of Japan's feudal past and were intended
only as a form of mass entertainment, often made on a low budget and
invariably comicbook-like in their narrative content. The extreme
violence seen in
Yojimbo, in
which characters are visibly seen to suffer as they are (literally)
hacked to pieces in the spectacular action sequences, exposes the crass
shallowness of the chambara genre and encouraged other Japanese
filmmakers to employ a more realistic approach in their films.
The bloodless chambara soon gave way to more spectacularly gory
successors, the
Tokusatsu and
Yakuza films, which revelled
in bloodshed and human misery.
In common with many of Kurosawa's films,
Yojimbo has its origins in western
culture. Loosely adapted from Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel
Red Harvest, the film also
shows the influence of the classic American western and film noir very visibly,
both in its atmospheric composition (most of the film takes place at
night under a blanket of stifling darkness) and the way in which the
location and the elements (notably the wind) become central to the
action (as in a John Ford western), not merely a static backdrop.
The stylistic and tonal similarities with Fred Zinnemann's
High
Noon (1952) are also quite evident, and Masaru Sato's jaunty
score owes far more to western influences than traditional Japanese
culture. The impression that
Yojimbo is little more than an
unashamed pastiche of the Hollywood western is reinforced when you
recall that director Sergio Leone remade it as
A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the
first in a series of popular spaghetti western in which Clint Eastwood
found fame as the unnamed mercenary gunman, the western equivalent of
the Ronin Samurai. (Leone's omission to secure remake rights from
Kurosawa resulted in a protracted and costly legal battle which delayed
the release of Leone's film by several years and made Kurosawa a very
wealthy man.)
Yojimbo has been the inspiration
for a number of other films since, most notably Walter Hill's
gangster-themed remake
Last Man
Standing (1996).
Yojimbo was the second film
that Kurosawa made for his newly founded independent production company
and was a welcome success after the failure of his first independent
film,
The Bad Sleep Well
(1960), a reinterpretation of Shakespeare's
Hamlet in which he addressed
similar concerns about corruption in modern Japan (albeit far more
directly). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kurosawa embraced
the switch to the widescreen process and exploited its potential to the
full - as can be seen from the masterfully choregraphed fight sequences
in
Yojimbo which effortlessly
fill every inch of the screen and give the film immense dramatic and
comedic power. Toshiro Mifune, one of Kurosawa's most frequent
collaborators, returns to play the invincible Samurai that he portrayed
so magnificently in earlier films, such as
Seven Samurai (1954) and
The Hidden Fortress
(1958). Mifune's improbable combination of bear-like physique and
balletic grace makes him ideal for the part of
Yojimbo's main character, the
mercenary Ronin named Sanjuro Kuwabatake (which translates as 'Mulberry
Field thirty-year-old', an obvious alias intended to conceal his true
identity). The ease with which Sanjuro dispatches his opponents
should be ludicrously comical, but Mifune's skill with a sword and the
way he gracefully moves across the screen like a human whirlwind
dispels any sense of absurdity. So successful was
Yojimba that Kurosawa followed it
up with an immediate sequel,
Sanjuro
(1962), with Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai (another superb, equally
charismatic actor) returning for a second, even bloodier showdown.
© James Travers 2012
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Next Akira Kurosawa film:
Sanjuro (1962)