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This Film On

Sanjuro

It didn't take long for Tohshiro Mifune to shamble back onto the screen to repeat his success in the role of Sanjuro. Introduced in 1961's Yojimbo, the cunning ronin returned a year later in Sanjuro, likewise directed and co-written by the unparalleled master of Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa. The character's name only becomes more ironic in the sequel, when he again improvises a vegetative moniker in a clumsy attempt to formulate a suitable identity: he's still Sanjuro ("thirty years old"..."going on forty"), but his other namesake is nearby camellia rather than the mulberry bush he spots in Yojimbo.

Rather than simply repeating the successful formula of Yojimbo, which incorporated humor but largely played it straight, Sanjuro flips the script for a largely comic action picture punctuated by a dark, rug-yanking conclusion. This time, the titular masterless samurai cleans up the mess created by the younger generation of a ruling clan, whose misplaced trust leaves them vulnerable to the clan's true enemy. Consistently decrying the young samurai as "idiots," expert strategist Sanjuro seemingly can't help himself from getting involved with the fallout of their political meddling, as the hapless bunch is desperately in need of saving. Upon his chivalrous rescue of a kidnapped mother and daughter from the bad guys, Sanjuro unwittingly wins himself a pesky conscience who advises him, "Please refrain from excessive violence."

Such cheerily counter-intuitive touches make Sanjuro a delight from beginning to almost-end, when Kurosawa takes the story's overt moral—"People aren't what they seem"—and applies it to his own picture. By the end, Mifune's twitchy, itchy ronin has lost his taste for meddling and for murder, but circumstances conspire to put him into an unavoidable standoff. Even at the fast pace by which Sanjuro was made, Kurosawa applies the full force of his cinematic genius, with brilliant widescreen composition that tells the story in visual terms as clear as the verbal ones: at every turn, even when surrounded by dozens of fellow blades, Sanjuro stands alone, damnably conscious of the ironic meeting within him of deadly skill and stealth idealism.