He soon encounters a farmer and his son (Yosuke Natsuki) quarreling, the older man telling the younger not to abandon his duties on the farm. Yojimbo starts with the masterless samurai wandering the countryside, throwing a stick in the air and following its path. But regardless of who he is, he won’t be forgotten by anyone he encounters. That’s not his real name - it roughly translates to Mulberry Thirty-Year Old - and it was picked by looking out at a field. The smaller characters are all memorable, from Kannuki (Tsunagoro Rashomon), the massive enforcer with a giant mallet, to the dim-witted Inokichi (Daisuke Katō), a vicious gangster who has to use his hands to realize that four is greater than two.īut the main attraction here is the yojimbo (bodyguard), a man who goes by Kuwabatake Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune). Masaru Sato’s score, which bounces along with the plot, is surprisingly jazzy for a samurai movie. Tohoīut historic praise ignores the fact that Yojimbo is extremely fun to watch. From John Wick to the Mandalorian, Yojimbo set the cinematic standard of a lone wolf against an army.Ī trope now so iconic you know never to bet on the army. Yojimbo was so influential to Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars that Kurosawa ended up suing Leone. Yojimbo, in turn, would inspire movie after movie for decades. It inspired Hammett to write pulp novels like Red Harvest and The Glass Key, and these novels would inspire Japanese director Akira Kurosawa to craft one of his many masterworks, 1961’s Yojimbo. This forgotten piece of history played an outsized role in global cinema. WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SCI-FI MOVIE? Tell us now for a chance to get paid to write an article for Inverse. He had given a man the right to think he would commit murder.” He refused, but as Hellman writes, “through the years he was to repeat that bribe offer so many times that I came to believe … that it was a kind of key to his life. Screenwriter Lillian Hellman wrote in her memoirs that Hammett, her partner, said he’d been offered $5,000 to kill Little.
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