The latest in my ongoing Kurosawa laptop film series is Yojimbo (1961), which Sergio Leone freely plagiarized in A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Kurosawa sued (he reportedly wrote to Leone, praising A Fistful of Dollars: "It is a very fine film, but it is my film") and won. Undaunted, Leone went on to make two more films around The Man With No Name, For A Few Dollars More ('65), and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly ('66). Kurosawa only managed a duo of films based on his own Man With No Name, following up Yojimbo with a flick called Sanjuro in '62.

As for the original, Kurosawa allegedly lifted his movie from Dashiell Hammett's novel, Red Harvest, which Leone swore was itself lifted from Carlo Goldoni's 18th century play, Servant of Two Masters.

I enjoyed both Kurosawa's and Leone's versions, although I'll admit I did not have it in me to follow some of the subtler plot twists (and they were none too subtle, truth told). I got the general idea, but in both films I found it took more mental energy than the minimum I was willing to exert to pay attention to who belonged to which clan and for what purpose exactly they were being held hostage, sliced and diced, set aflame, or shot.

Yojimbo is not one of my favorite Kurosawa films, if you want to know the truth, though it was in a hot period for the director, and the film was popular in Japan, and obviously inspired wildly popular "tributes" abroad. In fact, it's credited with taking the Western, a tired genre, in a whole new direction.

But its imitators were so numerous and are by now so well-known that it's hard to think back to a time when Carry Grant was Sheriff and the good guys were really good. The bad guys have always been bad, but Kurosawa introduced a good guy who could be worse than the worst of the bad guys. For its time, that was something. But this moral ambiguity has been the essence of the Western ever since.

You can see that it presented problems in the beginning. When Leone introduced his Man With No Name, he made sure to provide him with opportunities to do The Right Thing. Kurosawa's film does, too, but Leone, while sticking close to Kurosawa's plot, adds his two cents.

Among the subtler touches, the child his gunslinger rescues is named Jesus. He gives all the money he's scammed to Jesus' mother and father, Marisol and Julian, and helps them to flee into the desert. When they ask him why he's doing this for them, he says, because he once knew a family like them, and nobody was there to help them. He all but says, "there was no room in the inn."

Like I said, it's hard to fully appreciate Yojimbo as the original it was when you've seen so many imitators. So much of Kurosawa's oeuvre still feels so fresh — it seems to me that Yojimbo's orginality has been diluted a little by its success.

But beyond being jaded by half a century of Westerns that have employed a veritable army of Men With No Names, I have to admit watching Yojimbo that I missed the old Toshiro Mifune. I was so smitten with Mifune when I saw him first in Rashomon (1950)...


— he was something utterly new to me. Brilliant. Beyond delightful to watch. A genuine revelation. Then came (for me) 1954's The Seven Samurai, where he knocked my socks off again...


Mifune was in his forties when Yojimbo was made, and it seems to me his physical range was shrinking. This happens with physical actors like Mifune, I think, and with one as famous and well-loved, it can sometimes seem like he's phoning it in all the sudden.

Of course, there may be something else happening here: a more disciplined, sober performance, but if not a broadening, then a deepening of range, if that makes sense. I mean, there's only so much hopping around and pulling faces a man can do, and if you're that type, there will come a day when it won't be as endearing as it once was.

One of the challenges of coming on forty (I've got a couple years to go yet, but I've had plenty of time to contemplate it) is realizing that other talents and tools are now necessary to carry out your daily tasks. If you're at all clever, you've developed some shortcuts by the time the laws of physics kick in, and mass, weight, and inertia can no longer be denied. You suddenly realize: "it's gravity, stupid."

That's just the way it is. F~Mm/r² is the true measure of a man. How you deal with the crushing truth of it is what matters.

What I noticed in Yojimbo was that Mifune seemed to have adopted a sort of shorthand-Mifune style, a few signature moves tell you it is, indeed, Mifune you're watching: the trademark swagger; scratching his chest; his arms retracted into his robe, occasionally an errant hand, like Thing on leave from The Addams Family, peeping out of his collar to rub his neck or scratch his head.

This is distilled essence of Mifune. Occasionally we're treated with bursts of sudden pure Mifune energy, but even they are supremely controlled. This is a fundamentally different Mifune than we saw in earlier films. The feral thief in Rashomon, the wannabe warrior of The Seven Samurai, both of whom were undisciplined and prone to wild mood-swings. Even the raging warrior in 1957's The Throne of Blood (in which Mifune is already showing his age) is out of his mind most of the time.

The character Mifune plays in Yojimbo is still an outsider, but of a different sort. The opposite of these former parts. Here he's so skilled he has no need most of the time to show it. This character strikes me as a perfect match for the actor at this stage in his career. We know what Mifune can do. He doesn't need to do it here. Occasionally he gives us a little demonstration of what he's made of, just to make sure we haven't forgotten, and to show us he hasn't either.

The singular presence of Mifune is still undeniable, and actually accentuated by the multitude of players arrayed about him. He is indisputably the center of gravity here, and yet he's never stealing scenes by hamming it up. That may be a huge leap forward for the actor, and while there's still some subtle hamming going on, I found I missed the less subtle Mifune—the one Kurosawa once said could convey in only three feet of film an emotion that would require the average Japanese actor ten.  Mifune's up to about seven in Yojimbo.

Clint Eastwood's at about a hundred-and-seventy feet, on the other hand.  Eastwood is a laconic actor, perfect for the role of The Man With No Name.  A Fistful of Dollars basically launched his career as a major movie star, and marked the ascendancy of the laconic style in American action films. 

There is much to love in Leone's film, first and foremost, the horrendous Mexican accents.  There's also the caked-on make-up, the bright red blood that looks to have been borrowed from a barn-painting party, and, of course, sombreros galore! 


Aside from Eastwood, most of the actors were Italian, and said their lines in Italian. Spanglish was later dubbed over it all, when the movie was released in the U.S., and the whole effect is reminiscent of bad East European porn where the grunting and groaning is all dubbed in afterwards in a language none of the performers speak. 

But there is something joyful in the cheap chintziness of it all.  Watching it, you almost yearn for the days when you could make a movie for a couple hundred grand, not call it "indie" anything, and actually have people watch it. 

There is nothing remotely realistic about anything here.  It took Hollywood another ten years to learn how to make blood look like blood on-screen (Kurosawa was famous in his later epics for piling up corpses in dramatic tableaux — and the blood was always the color of red you see on the flag of Japan)...


The acting, too, is hammy, and part of Eastwood's charm here is that he seems to maintain a critical distance not only as the character he plays but in relation to the character he plays.  We get a sense of the actor playing a role, which is also an essential part of the role he's playing.  He is, in essence, an actor playing the role of an actor playing a role. Not that he gets all meta about, himself. 

But there are occasional, what amount to asides here, where Eastwood all but addresses the audience.  It's a look or a gesture — as when he's sneaking around and ends up clocking the beautiful young Marisol who's snuck up on him — that breaks down the fourth wall and momentarily engages us. 

Eastwood by this point is established as the moral center of the movie, as dubious as his morality is.  There is no one else to like, particularly.  You get the sense that he would be a moral man if he lived in a moral world.  As it is he's relegated to snuffing out the more egregious sins, and siding provisionally with the lesser of evils.  His best friend in the film is the coffin-maker, if that tells you anything.

All of this has comic implications, of course.  There's plenty of humor to go along with the more serious bits and the occasional scenes, however hamhandedly executed, that tip the scale and manage, in theory at least, to be horrific.  The slaughter of the Baxter Clan as they flee from their firebombed hacienda, for example.  The scene isn't the least bit funny, but the genius of Leone is in cutting his coat to fit his cloth. 

Nowadays, a scene like this could be rendered horrific by sheer virtue of verisimilitude.  Leone could not render it realistically (the art of cinematography just wasn't there yet), so we get grotesque instead.  Close-up shots of the Rojos clan's ghoulish laughter as they mow down their long-time foes with abandon. What is missing in terms of visual realism is being compensated for with psychological insight.  We're not talkin' Freud and Jung here, but you know what I'm sayin'.

Eastwood's particular brand of straight-man humor is on display in "The Dollars Trilogy," too.  It would reach its outer limits in Every Which Way But Loose and Every which Way You Can, the duo of films he did with an orangutan in the late seventies.  But here he's likable in his outsider status, playing both sides against one another, and taking it all seriously only when it's necessary to save his skin.  His moral pragmatism is the source of his strength as a character, and allows us to laugh at the bloodbath.

You never find humor in the absolute.  It's in the dark interstices between word and deed, and deed and word.  That's why the angels are such a boring lot, and heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.  Comedians have special license among all the players on the stage of life to state the obvious.  That's all good comedians really do.  They say what we're thinking but social convention forbids us to say.  That was the job of Lear's jester, and it continues up through the mass media jesters of today, from Dave Chappelle to Sarah Silverman.

Both Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars derive what humor is in them (and there's plenty) from the absurdity of mutually assured destruction.  The senselessness of war is one of Kurosawa's obsessions. It reaches a kind of grand apogee in later films like Kagemusha and Ran.  Kagemusha's final battle scene, and the agonizing aftermath, where we watch fallen men and horses writhing in heaps in the throes of a slow death for what seems like forever, are testaments to the extent of this obsession.  (This could account in part for why 1980's Kagemusha, while praised for aesthetic rigor, is not a well-loved film.  It's hard to take it in.)

In Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars the directors give us a way — through their Men With No Names, their versions of Everyman moving through a world gone mad — to laugh at the absurdity.  Kurosawa's later epics don't.