Original poster artwork · Great Cinema Master ListVenice · 1
Spoiler-free premise
A nameless ronin, or samurai with no master, enters a small village in feudal Japan where two rival businessmen are struggling for control of the local gambling trade.
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A wandering samurai enters a town divided between two criminal factions and offers his services to both sides. By feeding each group selective information, he tries to profit from their rivalry while accelerating their mutual destruction.
Why it belongs
Mifune's watchful rōnin sets two corrupt factions against each other while Yojimbo makes strategy, weather, movement, and dark comedy inseparable.
Read expanded why it belongsThe fuller editorial case+
Kurosawa stages the town's single dusty street as a tactical arena, deploying Toshiro Mifune's loose physicality, telephoto framing, wind, percussion, and darkly comic pauses to reinvent the samurai film as a cynical, spatially lucid Western.
