Effortlessly engaging and widely influential, Kurosawa’s second film of the 1960s lays the groundwork for the modern American western.
A nameless ronin, a samurai with no master, enters a small village in feudal Japan where two rival businessmen are struggling for control of the local gambling trade. Taking a false name, the ronin convinces both the silk merchant Tazaemon and the sake merchant Tokuemon to hire him as a personal bodyguard, then artfully sets in motion a full-scale gang war between the two ambitious and unscrupulous men.
Unofficially remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, Yojimbo has had an incalculable influence on world cinema, while also being a thoroughly entertaining crowd-pleaser with an award-winning lead performance by Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune.
This film is part of our Akira Kurosawa retrospective, running 10 March to 2 April. Join us in celebrating some of the finest work of the Japanese master of cinema.
- DIRECTOR: Akira Kurosawa
- CAST: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Eijiro Tono, Takashi Shimura
- LANGUAGE: Japanese with English subtitles
