Yojimbo

(Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1961)

Many cinema buffs like to credit Alfred Hitchcock with the invention of pure film, where every thrill and sigh results from the precise use of camera, music, editing and so on.

But this accolade belongs just as much to Japanese legend Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai, 1954). In Yojimbo (as in all his work) every action is breathtakingly compressed into the lightning interplay of movements, gestures, noises, entries and exits.

Those who, down the years, have stressed Kurosawa's big themes tend to overlook the comic art of Yojimbo – not to mention its brilliance as a swaggering, entirely physical action film.

A reworking of the stranger-in-a-small-town formula and starring Toshiro Mifune, it is credited with inspiring the Italian Westerns of the '60s – and certainly the saxophones and twangy guitars on the soundtrack (courtesy of the brilliant Masaru Sato) strikingly prefigure the music of Ennio Morricone.

MORE Kurosawa: Ran

© Adrian Martin July 1992