Cheap Yojimbo - Criterion Collection (DVD) (Akira Kurosawa) Price

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Customer Reviews of Yojimbo - Criterion Collection

Great Samurai movie with roots in American detective fiction
Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) is a samurai movie based in the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett - particularly Red Harvest. Akira Kurosawa wanted to bring the best of literature and interpret it into Japanese cinema. Its interesting that the two main influences in this process were Hammett's hard-boiled detective fiction and William Shakespeare (Ran, Throne of Blood). The always-excellent Toshiro Mifune plays the nameless title character who schemes and plots of take down an entire town of gamblers and gansters. I won't recap the story, suffice to say that his plans lead into several battles and some beautifully choreographed sword fights. Yojimbo was later made (nearly scene-for-scene) into A Fistfull of Dollars by Sergio Leone with Clint Eastwood as "The Man with No Name." Bruce Willis brought the character back to it's ganster/detective roots with the not-so-good "Last Man Standing." Yojimbo is awash with cinematic violence, but the charm infused into the movie by the cynical, yet obstinately principled, hero surprised me when I first saw it. The performances of the supporting cast, as usual with Kurosawa's films, add depth and wit to each scene. For what its worth, Yojimbo has gradually become one of my favorite movies. <
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>If you end up enjoying Yojimbo, check out The Seven Samurai, Sword of Doom, Miller's Crossing, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man. <
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>Criterion did an excellent job with their recent re-release of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, and they gave the same treatment to both Yojimbo & Sanjuro. A new (and improved) translation, commentary from Steven Price, as well as documentary film focusing on Kurosawa during the time he was making these great movies. This review is modified from my review of the Yojimbo/Sanjuro double DVD pack, each movie is great, but I'd recommend picking up both.

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Classic Samuri Movie
This movie is the inspiration for Fist Full of Dollars, a classic Clint Eastwood spaggetti western. It has a great plot, excellent character development, and of course classic samuri sword play. Great movie, worth the buy.

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a vastly entertaining action film
Yojimbo is a vastly entertaining action film with all the elements of that genre: fast pace, surprising plot turns, and a justly famous samurai showdown. <
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>But the central theme of the film is the difficulty of properly assessing trust and mistrust, and how the ability to do so is an essential feature of maturing from idealistic youth to seasoned adult. <
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>The plot setup is straightforward: nine idealistic samurai youths band together to clean their clan of corruption. The chief administrator is unsympathetic and thus earns their distrust. The friendly chamberlain is keen to help, and they are enthusiastic in their praise of him. Full of trust, they agree to meet him at an abandoned house. <
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>Unbeknownst to them, a wandering ronin (masterless samurai) played by the peerless Toshiro Mifune, has been sleeping in the back room, listening. They don't trust him at all, of course, even as he ascertains that the chamberlain is untrustworthy and plans to have them killed. Sure enough, dozens of armed men appear outside and only Mifune's quick thinking saves the young idealists from a sure death. <
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>Despite his obvious skills in parsing out who is trustworthy and who is not in the shifting loyalties and politics of the clan, the young hotheads continue to distrust Mifune; this desire to make those calculations themselves leads again and again to near-disaster. Each time, Mifune's experience and moxie enables him to evade far superior forces. <
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>At the film's conclusion, trust of another sort takes the stage. The evil samurai who was the corrupt chamberlain's right-hand man, played by the great Tatsuya Nakadai, feels that Mifune's manipulation of his trust was treachery of the blackest sort. Mifune explains that he had no choice but to mislead Nakadai (the details I will leave to the film). Nakadai says he cannot rest easy, and demands the satisfaction of a sword duel to the death. <
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>This is rich moral territory. So misleading the idealistic in order to eliminate them is treachery, but then so is misleading the evil servants of corruption--if you are the evil servant. But from the point of view of our hero, the false trust/treachery was simply an unavoidable part of saving the young idealists from destruction. <
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>By the film's end, the young idealists now appreciate Mifune's ability to sort out who deserves trust. This skill comes only with experience and maturity, and they have received a master class in trust from a rough-talking, uncouth ronin--one of the film's many sly ironies. <
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