Samurai films like these were actually a big influence on George Lucas. I have to admit that samurai movies were never my thing. They were also a big inspiration on Westerns, which I also wasn't a big fan of. It can be hard to follow a movie with just subtitles, especially one whose plot I don't know getting into. I'd probably still say "Rashomon" is my favorite Akira Kurosawa movie. This is still a great movie in itself.Actually, I think I was actually introduced to the plot of this movie by an episode of "Pokémon"! It was "Showdown At Dark City" which featured these two gangs in a city trying to get help from Ash. You have to give the anime credit for referencing something so highbrow. Anyway, the basic plot is that this guy named Sanjuro (not Yojimbo) goes to this corrupt village where two rival gangs both want him to work for him. As you might have guessed, he ends up playing both of them. There are few sympathetic characters at first.We do see some nice villagers who just want everybody to stop fighting. Sanjuro is shown to have no allies in this film prior to the story. It's a great way of seeing how a single character can play off of everyone else. There's even some really nice social and technological commentary. One guy has a gun which is an odd place for a samurai film. I also felt that the length of this film was just perfect. ****

Considering Kurosawa's incredible filmography, the fact that Yojimbo is generally considered as one of his best is an incredible compliment, and that opinion is very well justified. It is both an extremely entertaining battle of wits with great swordsplay sequences and fantastic dialogue and it also has some moral ambiguity.Ofcourse Toshiro Mifune steals the show once again in a Kurosawa film with his 'cool' charismatic attitude and his indifference to violence, yet also being an individual of some morals even though he seems to only care about gold at the start of the film. However, due to a certain selfless act in the later part of the movie where he saves a certain person it proves he is indeed an individual of some moral value. He is Sanjuro, which is an alias he gives, but nevertheless he is a ronin ( masterless samurai ) who wanders into a town divided by two rival gangs, so he decides to play them against eachother in order to make some gold in the progress since he seems to be penniless when he can't pay for his food at the restaurant. The movie combines Japan's three greatest actors together in one film with Toshiro, Tatsuya Nakadai & Takashi Shimura. After Nakadai's breakthrough in the first two parts of the incredible 'The Human Condition' trilogy in which he plays an idealistic good guy, he decided to play the villain in Yojimbo and in this shows his incredible range as an actor. Always keeping the evil fiendish smile on his face, his screen presence after Mifune has to be one of the strongest in cinematic history. Unfortunately Shimura ( Who had his greatest role in Ikiru (1952) ) has a relatively smart role, but still a crucial one to the plot.As usual Kurosawa uses his trademark tools movement and weather extremely well this film. It uses a lot of widescreen shots and excellent camera angles in which you never seem to miss a thing, they are always set up just right. Combined with the beautiful black and white cinematography there are some of cinema's greatest and most beautiful shots in this movie, especially during the epic final standoff which is one of the greatest scene's ever made. As stated before, Kurosawa also made use of weather once again to create the film's mood. It starts off bright and sunny, and as the violence escalates it starts raining, when finally in the climax there is a very hard wind blowing loads of epic looking dust on the screen. Kurosawa was a master of making loads of things happen in one single shot, and it is also the case here. A lot of shots have interesting things happen in the background, foreground and anywhere else in between. This movie created a couple of remakes such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) by Sergio Leone which, while being a great film, still does not quite live up to the quality of Yojimbo and Last Man Standing (1996) by Walter Hill, which is a very poor film. It goes to show how influential this movie also is to western directors since Kurosawa is also known for combining Japanese and western elements into his films, and you can see a bit of John Ford-like camera work in Yojimbo.Everything summed up this means Yojimbo is an incredibly vibrant, clever, in many cases beautiful motion picture created by the master Kurosawa himself.

A lonely mercenary arrives in town, finding it torn between two feuding families. Seeing a chance to earn a few coins he decides to sell his services as a killer to the highest bidder. In the process he ends up escalating the feud, turning the families against each other even worse than they already were. Sound familiar? That might be because this Akira Kurosawa film was remade in the West a few years later. Starring Clint Eastwood, the film was named A Fistful of Dollars. Perhaps you've heard of it.Keeping that in mind, the film is a fascinating watch. So many of the idiosyncrasies of spaghetti westerns can be explained by the fact that ultimately they're based on Japanese samurai films. The lonely, wandering hero. The gruff antihero that still ends up saving the day. The corruptibility of officials.It's also to be kept in mind that this is an Akira Kurosawa film. And quite honestly one of the best ones I've seen from him. The setting of the town is not all that big. A single street with a few important buildings, really. Yet it is used beautifully and the viewer becomes intimately familiar with it throughout the course of the film. Full props to Toshiro Mifune as well, playing the lead character, the cold and lethal ronin, who still hides a beating heart beneath his tattered clothes. One of his defining roles for a reason.Is the film without flaws? Not entirely. The musical cues are sometimes less than subtle, which is actually pretty common with Kurosawa, and the fight scenes, inventive though as they are, lack certain polish. A sword might miss by several hand-widths, yet the opponent still screams and falls. Small touches like that.Still, the story and the characters are so great here that I'm fully comfortable calling this better than A Fistful of Dollars. Not by much, but it does beat that classic. And that's saying something.

In 1860, during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate,a rōnin (masterless samurai) wanders through a desolate Japanese countryside. While stopping at a farmhouse, he overhears an elderly couple lamenting that their only son has given up farm labouring in order to run off and join the rogues who have descended on a nearby town that has become divided by a gang war. The stranger heads to the town where he meets the owner of a small Izakaya who advises him to leave. He tells the rōnin that the two warring clans are led by Ushitora and Seibei. The silk merchant and mayor back Seibei while the sake brewer is allied with Ushitora. But after sizing up the situation, the stranger says he intends to stay as the town would be better off with both sides dead.