Long silences dotted with music that is occasionally intrusive. A shaky camera, and an old man tells our nameless ronin about the two rival mobs in the local village. The samurai expresses a desire to rid the village of both of them, and soon has each boss vying for his employment.
The main character, who names himself Sanjuro Kuwabatake, is very calm, he moves as someone who is familiar with his own body and who is indifferent to the world around him, yet displays many doggy characteristics. This harmonizes with the gang members, as particularly when battling they stand low to the ground and move jerkily. When Sanjuro first arrives a dog holding a human hand trots by him. This dog is an extension of the nature of the townspeople, and of Sanjuro himself. Other characters display the characteristics of rats, skulking and fawning over the samurai.
I liked the scene where Sanjuro watches the two gangs try and fight each other. Both do a great job at acting like a pack of dogs; no one man wanting to be the first to close, and the battle is eventually interrupted.
An excellent use of the loud, jarring music is the micky mousing as one of the bosses walk down a set of stairs behind Sanjuro. Like this, many aspects of the body language of characters in this movie are comedic. This helps to make the sudden outbursts of violence more shocking, especially (I imagine) to an early 60's audience.
The natural sounds throughout the film compliment the music, most notably the howling wind, which tends to signal arrival and/or desolation. The differences in the village between a hot, dusty day and a chilly wet one are vast, and it is in these differences that 'Yojimbo' has beauty. As the wind howls, billows of white dust shroud figures standing in the street. The pervasive tinkle of rain hitting the buildings is combined with runnels of water flooding from roof corners and down walls.
Sanjuro is an interesting character, as he goes back and forth between heroic and plain unlikable. He claims to be disgusted by "weak people", yet he goes out of his way to rescue a woman from one of the bosses, and return her to her husband and child. My favourite character though was a brother of one of the bosses, who owns the only pistol in the village, and takes it out and brandishes it all the time.
The fighting itself isn't really up to much, and through most of it it is clear that one man is just wiping a dull blade over another's chest, to over dramatic cries of pain. I'd have thought that the fighting would be one of the strong points of a movie like this, and the sometimes almost funny fight scenes really pull me out of the story.
Overall though not a bad film, while the plot has doubtless evolved from many other stories such as 'The Glass Key' and possibly 'Red Harvest', elements of it can be seen in many later movies, both Asian and other noir.
Yojimbo: 46.8