Sanjuro

Sanjuro (1962) begins with nine young samurai meeting secretly in a temple. They believe their clan is corrupt and they have asked the wrong man for help. A scruffy ronin asleep in the loft wakes up, tells them their plan is wrong from beginning to end, and reluctantly takes it over. Its origin is interesting. The script was originally a straight adaptation of Shūgorō Yamamoto's story Hibi Heian. After Yojimbo succeeded, the studio wanted that film's popular antihero back, and Kurosawa rewrote the script to fit the ronin into it. It was not designed as a sequel; it was converted into one. Toshiro Mifune plays Sanjuro. The comedy of the character is the film's main vein: the young samurai keep doing the wrong thing and Sanjuro keeps grumbling. The final duel is its best known moment. When Sanjuro's sword lands, the blood comes out in an enormous spray, extraordinarily graphic for the time. In a 1980 interview Kurosawa said it had been a deliberate experiment, and criticised the directors who copied it afterwards; in his view it got in the way of exploring character. It was Toho's highest grossing release of 1962 and the second highest grossing film in Japan that year, taking 450.1 million yen in distributor rentals and beating even King Kong vs. Godzilla. It runs 96 minutes. Good for: samurai films, comedy fused with action, and Mifune. Less good for: without Yojimbo the character's register arrives without context. The clan politics are dense and the names hard to hold. The violence is mostly indirect, so the pace is slow if you came for action.