Country
Japan
Year
1961
Language
Japanese spoken, Dutch subtitles
Actors
Toshiro Mifune, Eijiro Tono, Seizaburo Kawazu
Director
Akira Kurosawa
Duration
110 min
Kurosawa’s 4K restoration of the visually stunning and darkly comic Yojimbo – featuring the peerless Toshiro Mifune – was hugely influential, changing the Western genre forever.
Wandering samurai Sanjuro Om arrives in a 19th-century village where he uses all his ingenuity and fighting skills to pit two local crime bosses against each other, cleverly turning the war between the two evil clans to his advantage. In Yojimbo, almost everyone's actions are questionable: fire is fought with fire. Kurosawa's tense, entertaining film changed the western genre forever and remains one of the most influential films of all time.
Sergio Leone drew inspiration from Yojimbo for his spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars (starring Clint Eastwood) and Walter Hill remade Last Man Standing (starring Bruce Willis). Similar storylines can be found in Django (1966) and Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012).
The Best of Akira Kurosawa
In July we will show five timeless masterpieces by Japanese grandmaster Akira Kurosawa, a pioneer in combining Western storytelling techniques with Japanese stories. This led to groundbreaking films that inspired filmmakers worldwide, from Sergio Leone to George Lucas. We will show three epic samurai films (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ran), a crime thriller (High and Low) and a human drama (Ikiru).
There are no new dates planned (yet) for Classics: Yojimbo.
