This is my second time around with this Kurosawa film, too, and I still don’t see what everyone else does in it. I get that Kurosawa adapts the conventions of the western into a Japanese context here, and I get that the movie is technically great.
But I still don’t respond to it the way that so many critics do. I find it clever – shots like the low-angle ones with architecture or the bell in the background are citations from so many westerns. And the dusty street scenes shot from behind one group looking out the other, a classic shoot-out composition albeit using guys with swords and wearing Japanese clothes. But I find this kind of cinematic borrowing more clever than insightful or creative. Films like Yojimbo remind me of Quentin Tarantino’s approach to film; appropriate some distinctive film flourishes from an external source (Asian B-movies on Tarantino’s part; the Western on Kurosawa’s) and then put the borrowings together skillfully so the cinematic elements make some sense to the target audience. This citation/appropriation, to me, never rises much above “clever.”
Of course there are Kurosawa touches here that are unique to him: there’s Lady Macbeth in the character of Seibei’s wife, and there’s the humanity at the center of so much of what I like about Kurosawa. Yojimbo offers Sanjuro’s pity for the plight of the kidnapped mother as well as the endearing figures of the restaurant owner and coffin maker. And Toshiro Mifune puts in another amazing performance here, too.
But these touches don’t make Yojimbo for me. Maybe I have a limited sense of humor, but the horns and 60s flourishes of the soundtrack are unnecessarily heavy-handed intrusions to me, the drum roll behind a comedy routine, and the comedy often seems based in traditions or cultural values that are too distant for me to sense and respond to.
So although Yojimbo was a hugely influential film in popular culture, I think I’d put my money on films like Throne of Blood and High and Low.
