Yojimbo poster & wallpaper

Daisuke Katô, Eijirô Tono, Isuzu Yamada

A samurai drifter arrives at a small town where two factions are battling each other. He offers to fight on the side of the highest bidder, but then secretly arranges a ploy to have both sides destroy...( read more  read more... ) each other.

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96% liked it

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97% liked it

32 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 50 min.

Directed by: Akira Kurosawa

Release Date: September 13, 1961

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DVD Release Date: September 28, 1999

Stats: 2,029 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (2,029)

  • sanjurosamurai
    June 23, 2009
    sanjurosamurai
    after yet another viewing im reminded of why this is one of my favorite films of all time. my favorite actor playing his best role, it is fascinating to watch this ronin samurai play such a distant character who at the same time is perfectly calculated in every step he makes. t...( read more)his film is often imitated and never equaled, especially the exceptional scene at the end where sanjuro is standing at the edge of the street just moments away from his stand against his enemies. the music, weather, and cinematography were used perfectly and the entire film from start to finish could not have been carried out any better. this film improves with each viewing.
  • stopitgoaway
    January 9, 2009
    stopitgoaway
    If you ever watched Pulp Fiction and thought: movie cool was born here, or maybe you saw any single Sergio Leone movie and thought: this guy invented movie-cool (if you haven't, i thoroughly recommend it - Kill Bill is nothing to his Good, the Bad and the Ugly or Once Upon a Time...( read more) in the West), then experience Yojimbo, or The Bodyguard. Kurosawa's camera sits behind Toshiro Mifune's man-with-no-name, inviting us to look up at the back of his head as he walks the earth, inviting us to be in awe of this man. And as he walks, super-cool walking-the-earth music plays. Later on, when he's taunted and asked to prove himself, he slices a guy's arm off and plays the petty, money-grabbing rival factions in the town he wanders into off each other.

    If you have it in your mind that a guy called Kurosawa couldn't make movies that would impress you, that the cultural gap would be too great - be assured that Kurosawa's movies are rife with Western values. Sure, they are rife with Japanese values (i am told), but Kurosawa had a great appreciation of Western culture. He based many of his movies on Western texts, like Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, or American gangster fiction and film. Yojimbo is one of the latter - inspired by the Dashiell Hammet novel Red Harvest (Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon was put onscreen moment for moment by John Huston in the movie of the same name which immortalised Humphrey Bogart).

    Actually, the history of the story of the lone wolf, the wanderer with a weapon, who rides into town to play off two warring factions against each other - is quite a story itself. Dashiell Hammett, an American, wrote a novel with an American private eye as the stranger. In 1961, Akira Kurosawa transposed this story to medieval Japan, after the fall of a dynasty, where a Samurai finds himself with no place to go (at the beginning, we see him throw a branch up in the air and walk the direction it falls), and no master to serve. A bodyguard with no-one to protect. In 1964, Sergio Leone transposed the screenplay of Yojimbo (nearly word for word) to the spanish desert, and he brought along a young television actor named Clint Eastwood, and together they revolutionised the western with Fistfull of Dollars, and created an entire genre, the Spaghetti Western, which sported among its attributes a gritty, desolate landscape, and a cynical, postmodern lack-of-values ideology (traditional American westerns had quite plush landscapes and were always black and white (good and evil) in their value system. Despite the massive influence of Fistfull of Dollars, it pales in comparison to both its predecessor Yojimbo, and its sequals, For a Few Dollars More and The Good the Bad and the Ugly. But still, both Yojimbo and Fistful are iconic movies, and very cool movies.

    With good music, a great anti-hero, a fun script, and a visually spectacular canvas of an image, painted by the eye of an artist (it is said that Kurosawa storyboarded his movies in full-scale paintings), Yojimbo is one of the amusing movies ever made.
  • AgentLexi2132
    November 28, 2008
    AgentLexi2132
    ''You're all tough, then?''
    '' What? Kill me if you can!''
    ''It'll hurt.''


    A crafty ronin comes to a town divided by two criminal gangs and decides to play them against each other to free the town.

    Toshirô Mifune: Sanjuro Kuwabatake / The Samurai

    Yojimbo...( read more) is another Great from Legendary Akira Kurosawa which is a clever story of a beguiling Samurai who plots to defeat two rival groups for the good of the town.
    Toshirô Mifune as Sanjuro/The Samurai shows is great acting skill yet again with a character as unique as his role in Seven Samurai. The cleverness and swordplay he possesses on screen is wonderful.

    There's some genius storytelling here and the music also does a nice touch of telling the story and adding humour. Severed limbs, a dog with a hand in it's mouth accompanied with some of the droney mellow tunes imaginable. Some of the orchestra work reminds me of a big meandering bear roaming about to and fro in a drunken daze.
    Close ups of faces, some amazing swordfights and fast Samurai Sword cuts. There's even guns in this that to me seem out of place in this eastern world.
    The movie screams seriousness but is playful and gleeful too.

    The plot is clever and I'm sure alot of future movies have derived from this simple idea of one man outwitting a number of villainous characters.

    Again the final battle is one to be admired. One man fighting against many, against cheats and a cowardly armed pistol wielding power hungry youth. What happens has to be watched and witnessed. It's masterful and quick, blink and you miss it.

    Yojimbo another baby grand from Akiro and an unforgettable experience.
  • organgrinder136
    October 5, 2008
    organgrinder136
    obviously kurosawa in the sense that the story unfolds slowly even in his "action film" but being a sad git i sat and watched it twice today and noticed that not a detail is missed. while not being as well known as the seven samurai it's another of his that influenced so many fut...( read more)ure films either directly or indirectly. toshiro mifune gives a more mature performance as the central protagonist but unfortunately doesn't have a great deal of dialogue compared to the other characters of the story. realism and entertainment have never intertwined so seamlessly other than in kurosawa's films, before or since. the re-makes lacked the realism and were therefore boring
  • rubystevens
    June 13, 2008
    rubystevens
    yes it's better than a fistful of dollars :D i just wish i'd seen it first! love the soundtrack too. kurosawa successfully sued leone for 15% of the worldwide gross and made more from the lawsuit than he did on this film apparently
  • macabrescribe
    October 18, 2009
    macabrescribe
    Toshiro Mifune gives quite a demanding performance. His embodiment of the character forces the audience to always keep at least one eye on him at all times. The story is good, but it occasionally becomes confusing because its plot is almost too intricate, but maybe it only seems ...( read more)that way because I've only seen it once. Nevertheless, Yojimbo is an exceptional Japanese-style western.
  • ElCochran90
    September 11, 2009
    ElCochran90
    Review coming someday...

    100/100
  • jscottcorley
    September 5, 2009
    jscottcorley
    Did I mention Kurosawa rules? Mifune is fantastic in the "one man stands alone" samurai flick.
  • bhdr
    August 28, 2009
    bhdr
    Leone 's For a Fistful of Dollars must be the remake of this movie !!
  • TheBeginningAndTheEnd
    August 4, 2009
    TheBeginningAndTheEnd
    One badass Japanese western-influenced film. Sanjuro has got to be one of the coolest movie characters ever created.

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Critic Reviews

January 20, 2006
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Even Eastwood's Man With No Name is inspired, perhaps, by the samurai in Yojimbo. full review

View more Yojimbo reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

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  • What Akira Kurosawa film was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars?  Answer »
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