Cast: Toshirô Mifune, Seizaburô Kawazu, Kyu Sazanka and Tatsuya Nakadai
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Rating:
Enetertainment Quotient: 60%
Genre: Action / Drama
Language: Japanese
Color: Black and White
Runtime: 110 min
MPAA rating: Unrated

Synopsis:

Sanjuro (Toshirô Mifune) is an unemployed samurai of Japan in the 1960s. He wanders to a village to find that two rival gangs are fighting each other and giving sleepless nights to the village. This wily Samurai offers to play Yojimbo (bodyguard) to the bosses of these gangs. He works for money (whoever gives more). The rest of the story is about how he eliminates the all members of the gangs by creating rifts between them.

What is special in this film?
The entire set up of this film is like a western cowboy flick. The shots, camera positions and movements in this film are imitated worldwide. Toshirô Mifune epitomizes the role of the wandering Samurai. Akira Kurosawa sets up the mood and transports you to a new world. Music and cinematography are great. The stunt sequences are very realistic..

The scenes I liked:

1. The introduction scene of the Samurai (showing him from the backside)
2. Samurai unites mother and kid, and then gives away all his earnings.
3. The way Sanjuro strips off the shirt of a goon with a few strikes of the sword (later adapted into ‘The Mask of the Zorro’)
4. The climax fight

Tailpiece:
Sanjuro is inspired by the American writer Dashiell Hammett's detective classic 'Red Harvest' (1929). Sanjuro in turn inspired western filmmakers so much that Sergio Leone, Walter Hill and David Lynch remade this film in Hollywood as ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, 'Wild At Heart' and ‘Last Man Standing' respectively. Kurosawa sued Sergio Leone for remaking Yojimbo as ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ without buying the rights. Kurosawa subsequently made a sequel to this film titled ‘Sanjuro’.