Yojimbo

First as tragedy (The Bad Sleep Well), then as farce. The opening jest has the snowy mountain range in the distance rhymed in the protagonist's back as he enters the frame, no less majestic until he wiggles his shoulders and scratches his ears. "Hungry dogs come running when they smell blood," one saunters around the cutthroat-infested hamlet with severed hand in maw, just the place for the cunning ronin (Toshiro Mifune) to find work. "I'll stay awhile." Merchants and their private armies, silk (Seizaburo Kawazu) versus sake (Kyu Sazanka). Innkeeper (Eijiro Tono) marks neutral terrain, coffin maker (Atsushi Watanabe) prospers in times of carnage. "The shortcut to hell," slayings and kidnappings are the norm while terrorized denizens peer from behind window slats, "a big house cleaning" is in order. Akira Kurosawa gives samurai honor and also takes it away, his warrior-for-rental protagonist strokes his beard and ponders how to nudge rival houses toward mutual annihilation. Coolly amoral, blessed with Mifune's rumpled deadpan among scurrying grotesques, he perches himself atop a watch tower that might be a director's crane and chuckles as the venal foes advance and retreat at opposite edges of the TohoScope widescreen. "I'll get paid for killing, and this town is full of people who deserve to die." (His solitary noble deed earns him a pummeling at the hands of a mammoth goon who suggests Jack Palance by way of Chester Gould.) Susumu Fujita's cameo as the departing older swordsman embodies Edo regime's twilight, the new epoch belongs to the smirking punk (Tatsuya Nakadai) with plaid scarf and Western pistol. Lines of vicious action in clenched deep-focus arrangements, showdown of blade and bullet, Brecht-Weill's Mahagonny merrily strewn with corpses in the end. "Did you write this new little drama?" Sanjuro continues the sanguinary slapstick. Cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa. With Isuzu Yamada, Daisuke Kato, Takashi Shimura, Hiroshi Tachikawa, Kamatari Fujiara, Sachio Sakai, Ikio Sawamura, Yoko Tsukasa, Yoshio Tsuchiya, and Yosuke Natsuki. In black and white.