Toshiro Mifuno is one of the great movie tough guys. That’s because he DOESN’T win all of the time. He takes a beating. He gets knocked within an inch of his life. Mifune gets reduced to a moaning, bloody mess on the floor. And then he comes back and slices up everybody. He’s got lines on his face and a little extra weight on his body, but he gives off the impression here of a man who’s in his prime when it comes to brutal living. Every year of a life lived by the sword packs on the kind of muscle that a younger badass can’t match, even if that guy is the only one in the old rural Japanese village with a gun, which he brandishes like it’s a holy gift from God bestowed upon him because he’s just that cool. This joker needs to die and Mifune is just the man to deal it out.
See this great film to see how he does it. Director Akira Kurosawa understands pulp. He flies through this story on furious wings. Danger is a constant presence. The backgrounds are sometimes just as lively as the foregrounds. Kurosawa draws you into the setting and then he splatters it with blood. He gets you to know the people in it and then he kills damn near all of ’em.
The story: A mysterious samurai wanders into a town controlled by two rival gangsters. From there, he manipulates these two sides into destroying each other. It resulted in some silly legal action when Sergio Leone’s western A Fistful of Dollars came out a few years later with a nearly identical plot. Meanwhile, Yojimbo got beat to its premise thirty years earlier by American writer Dashiell Hammett in his “bad town” novel Red Harvest.
It’s a very beautiful lineage, if you ask me. The samurai, the gunslinger and the private investigator are all the same character in the same role. It translates so easily through place and time. See Yojimbo to ride this train the whole way on its dark path.