Yojimbo (1961)

Director:

Akira Kurosawa

Writers:

Akira Kurosawa (story)
Akira Kurosawa (screenplay) ...
(more)

Release Date:

13 September 1961 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Comedy | Crime | Drama | Thriller

Plot:

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

Plot Keywords:

Samurai | Escape | Bodyguard | Ronin | Jidai Geki

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar. Another 3 wins & 1 nomination

Cast

Toshirô Mifune	...	Sanjuro Kuwabatake / The Samurai
Tatsuya Nakadai	...	Unosuke, gunfighter
Yôko Tsukasa	...	Nui
Isuzu Yamada	...	Orin
Daisuke Katô	...	Inokichi, Ushitora's rotund brother
Seizaburô Kawazu	...	Seibei, brothel operator
Takashi Shimura	...	Tokuemon, sake brewer
Hiroshi Tachikawa	...	Yoichiro
Yosuke Natsuki	...	Kohei's Son
Eijirô Tôno	...	Gonji, tavern keeper
Kamatari Fujiwara	...	Tazaemon
Ikio Sawamura	...	Hansuke
Atsushi Watanabe	...	The Cooper (Coffin-Maker)
Susumu Fujita	...	Homma, instructor who skips town
Kyû Sazanka	...	Ushitora
Kô Nishimura	...	Kuma
Takeshi Katô	...	Ronin Kobuhachi
Ichirô Nakatani	...	First Samurai
Sachio Sakai	...	First Foot Soldier
Akira Tani	...	Kame
Namigoro Rashomon	...	Kannuki the giant
Yoshio Tsuchiya	...	Kohei
Gen Shimizu	...	Magotaro
Yutaka Sada	...	Matsukichi
Shin Ôtomo	...	Kumosuke
Shôichi Hirose	...	Ushitora Follower
Eisei Amamoto	...	Yahachi
Shôji Oki	...	Sukeju
Fuminori Ohashi	...	Second Samurai
Hiroshi Yoseyama	...	Farmer
Senkichi Ômura	...	Traveler
Noriko Honma	...	Farmer's ex-wife (as Fumiko Honma)
Ryusuke Nishio	...	Seibei Follower
Naoya Kusakawa	...	Seibei Follower
Nadao Kirino	...	Seibei Follower
Jun Ôtomo	...	Seibei Follower
Shinpei Takagi	...	Ushitora Follower
Akio Kusama	...	Ushitora Follower
Yasuzô Ogawa	...	Ushitora Follower
Hiroshi Takagi	...	Ushitora Follower
Junichirô Mukai	...	Seibei Follower
Fumiyoshi Kamagaya	...	Seibei Follower
Ichirô Chiba	...	Second Foot Soldier
Haruya Sakamoto	...	Ushitora Follower
Rinsaku Ogata	...	Seibei Follower
Fumio Kogushi	...	Ushitora Follower
Yoko Terui	...	Woman at Seibei's house
Hiromi Mineoka	...	Woman at Seibei's house
Michiko Kawa	...	Woman at Seibei's house
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Takuzô Kumagai		(as Jirô Kumagai)
Jerry Fujio	...	Roku, samurai whose arm is cut (uncredited)

Directed by
Akira Kurosawa

Writing credits
Akira Kurosawa		(story)
Akira Kurosawa		(screenplay) &
Ryûzô Kikushima		(screenplay)

Produced by
Ryûzô Kikushima	....	executive producer
Akira Kurosawa	....	producer
Tomoyuki Tanaka	....	executive producer

Original Music by
Masaru Satô

Cinematography by
Kazuo Miyagawa

Film Editing by
Akira Kurosawa

Production Design by
Yoshirô Muraki

Costume Design by
Yoshirô Muraki

Makeup Department
Yoshiko Matsumoto	....	hair stylist
Junjiro Yamada	....	hair stylist

Production Management
Hiroshi Nezu	....	production supervisor

Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Masanobu Deme	....	assistant director
Shirô Moritani	....	chief assistant director

Art Department
Koichi Hamamura	....	property master
Yoshifumi Honda	....	assistant art director

Sound Department
Choshichiro Mikami	....	sound recordist
Ichirô Minawa	....	sound effects editor
Masanobu Miyazaki	....	sound mixer
Zen Shida	....	assistant sound
Hisashi Shimonaga	....	sound recordist

Camera and Electrical Department
Masao Fukuda	....	still photographer
Choshiro Ishii	....	lighting technician
Shôji Kaneko	....	assistant lighting technician
Takao Saitô	....	assistant camera

Costume and Wardrobe Department
Masahiro Katô	....	costumer

Editorial Department
Reiko Kaneko	....	assistant editor

Transportation Department
Ginzo Osumi	....	transportation coordinator

Other crew
Hiroshi Kanesu	....	choreographer
Ryû Kuze	....	swordplay technique
Teruyo Nogami	....	script supervisor
Yoshio Sugino	....	swordplay instructor

Production Companies

• Kurosawa Production Co.
• Toho Company

Distributors

• Seneca International (1961) (USA) (theatrical) (subtitled)
• Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) (1972) (USA) (TV) (network premiere)
• Action Film (1964) (Sweden) (theatrical)
• Cowboy Pictures (2002) (USA) (theatrical) (re-release)
• Continental Home Vídeo (2002) (Brazil) (DVD)
• Criterion Collection, The (2004) (USA) (DVD)
• Criterion Collection, The (2009) (USA) (DVD)
• Madman Entertainment (2004) (Australia) (DVD)
• Palace Video (1983) (UK) (VHS)
• Palace Video (1983) (UK) (video) (Betamax)
• Sandrews (2003) (Sweden) (DVD)
• Tocantins (19??) (Brazil) (VHS)
• Toho Company

Other Companies

• Toho Studios  sound stages

Also Known As:

Yojimbo (UK) (USA)
The Bodyguard (International: English title) (literal title)
Yôjinbô (International) (modified Hepburn romanization)
Yojimbo the Bodyguard (USA)
Le garde du corps (Canada: French title) (France) [fr]
Yojimbo (Argentina) (Spain) [es]
A testör (Hungary) [hu]
Die Leibwache (West Germany) [de]
La sfida del samurai (Italy) [it]
Livvagten (Denmark) [da]
Mercenario (Spain) [es]
Straz przyboczna (Poland) [pl]
Yojimbo (Greece) [el]
Yojimbo - Der Leibwächter (West Germany) [de]
Yojimbo - Livvakten (Sweden) [sv]
Yojimbo - O Guarda-Costas (Brazil) [pt]
Yojimbo - onnensoturi (Finland) [fi]
Yojimbo, o Invencível (Portugal) [pt]

Runtime:

110 min | USA:75 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Perspecta Stereo (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

Germany:12 | Netherlands:12 | New Zealand:M | USA:TV-MA (cable rating) | Argentina:16 | Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | Norway:16 | Spain:13 | Sweden:15 | USA:Unrated | UK:PG (video rating) (1993) | UK:A (original rating)

Filming Locations:

Toho Studios, Tokyo, Japan

Company:

Kurosawa Production Co.

Trivia:

Akira Kurosawa challenged his assistant directors to come up with an image for the film to let Sanjuro know he was entering a bad town. He shot down all of their ideas, since all of them had already been done. Kurosawa himself then came up with the idea of the dog carrying the human hand.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: The interval between the noise of the gunshot, and the ringing of bell is too long.

Quotes:

[after Unosuke dies]
Sanjuro: He died as he lived.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Beantown (2007)

The epitome of cinema cool.

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 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 cool music, a cool 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 coolest movies ever made.