Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.
For many Western viewers, the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is associated first and foremost with samurai films and the actor Toshirô Mifune. Sanjuro (1962) is one reason why.
Historical Background: Akira Kurosawa was something of a one-man cultural exchange program. He borrowed liberally from Western cultures and his work was liberally imitated, pilfered, or paid homage to (depending on how you look at it) by Western filmmakers. Among the Western source materials adapted by Kurosawa were Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and Gorky's The Lower Depths. The predecessor of Sanjuro, Yojimbo (1961), bears the clear influence of Hollywood westerns of the 1950’s as well as film noir, in temperament and visual style. For its part, Hollywood remade Yojimbo twice – once as the Western A Fistful of Dollars (1964), starring Clint Eastwood, and later as the crime story, Last Man Standing (1966), starring Bruce Willis. A Fistful of Dollars was the first so-called spaghetti Western, marketed in Italy under the name Per Un Pugno di Dollar. Mifune's character in Yojimbo and Sanjuro is essentially the character that Clint Eastwood played over and over again in his films and also gave life to John Belushi's satirical samurai character on Saturday Night Live.
Sanjuro was the concluding film in a golden twelve year span in Kurosawa's career that provided many of his most revered creations, including Rashômon (1950), Ikiru (1952), The Seven Samurai (1954), The Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961), and Sanjuro (1962). Yjimbo had blockbuster success in Japan and Kurosawa decided to go to the well for a second time, making the first and last sequel of his career.
The Story: Nine young and idealistic samurai in a Japanese village have gathered at a temple for a secret meeting to discuss what to do about the rampant corruption that is plaguing their clan. The group's leader is Iori Izaka (Yuzo Kayama), the nephew of the Chamberlain (village chief). Izaka reports that he met with his uncle, who had told him that he knew about the corruption and had warned Izaka that he might be surprised by who's behind it. Izaka had then gone to the superintendent, Kikui (Masao Shimizu), who had expressed astonishment and had immediately asked Izaka to join him in rooting out the problem. Suddenly, noises are heard from a nearby back room and a scruffy samurai, Sanjura (Toshirô Mifune), emerges, stretching and yawning. He has overheard their conversation and astonishes the young warriors by telling them that they have appraised the situation exactly backwards. Clearly it is the Superintendent, he says, who is corrupt and the Chamberlain who is honorable. The young men, he asserts, have been misled by the disparity in appearance of the two men (the Chamberlain has a long, unattractive face while the Superintendent is better looking) and by the duplicity of the Superintendent.
The young warriors are naturally dubious until Sanjuro further predicts that the Superintendent will send a large force to arrest the young men. Sure enough, the temple is already being surrounded. The young samurai are ready to fight to the death, but Sanjuro suggests another course of action. The young men hide underneath the floorboards while Sanjuro alone emerges from the temple to confront the small army of Kikui's men. After Sanjuro easily dispatches about a half dozen of the enemy, their leader, Hanbei Muroto (Tatsuya Nakadai), orders the rest to withdraw, recognizing that it would take quite some time and the loss of many men to overcome Sanjuro.
Sanjuro becomes the de facto leader of the young hot-heads, though they sometimes remain suspicious of him or seek to assert their independence. Whenever they strike out on their own, they invariably strike out. Sanjuro has to bail them out repeatedly from their own impulsive misjudgments. At times he seems more interested in napping and eating than fighting or conspiring. Sanjuro himself contributes a bit to the mistrust by failing to explain adequately his thinking or his intentions.
Sanjuro and his companions learn that the Chamberlain and his wife and daughter have been kidnapped. The Superintendent hopes to force the Chamberlain to sign a confession of malfeasance and then kill him, thereby gaining control of the clan. The Superintendent is being held in an unknown location, so Sanjuro and his cohort of nine young warriors set out to rescue the wife (Takako Irie) and daughter, Chidori (Reiko Dan), first. The plot is as much about strategy as outright fighting. The ten "good guys" are greatly outnumbered and can't simply confront the enemy at full strength. Sanjuro meets his match, for once, in a way, in the form of the Chamberlain's wife. She's from an elevated social class and detests violence. Though she and Sanjuro are entirely mismatched in their social values, Sanjuro recognizes that she is perceptive, at times, and can peer into the dark void that is his soul. She scolds him, saying, "Killing is a bad habit. You're like a drawn sword. You cut well. But good swords are kept in their sheathes." She intervenes to spare the life of a prisoner (Keiju Kobayashi) who Sanjuro had decided would have to be killed and gains the man's cooperation instead. Sanjuro is also a bit taken back by the women's appreciation for the smell of the hay and the beauty of some camellia petals, realizing that he's lost an appreciation for the simple wonders of life that they enjoy.
Each group of samurai sets traps for the other and it all plays out like a chess match. I won't reveal more of the specifics, so that readers can discover for themselves how the various maneuvers play out. There's a fine piece of drama at the film's conclusion that will stick in your mind's eye long after you've removed the film from your DVD player.
Themes: Kurosawa has built several interesting themes into this film. One is the nature of leadership. Sanjuro is a natural leader, simply by the combination of his competence and his confidence. He doesn't vie for leadership, he simply illuminates the best avenue for advancing a cause and others follow. The young samurai that he links up with are energetic, courageous, and enthusiastic, but inexperienced and lacking in insight. They are fooled by appearances and are ready to rush into every trap that's set for them. Sanjuro is ragged in appearance, scratches himself repeatedly and yawns a lot, but he is the real tiger and the others mere kittens. A related theme and one that Kurosawa hammers on perhaps too relentlessly is the idea that incompetent allies are sometimes worse than enemies. I've had that experience myself, on occasion. There's nothing I hate worse, for example, than hearing irrational arguments coming out of the mouths of fellow liberals. I'd far prefer hearing foolish statements coming from those on the other side of the political spectrum, because such foolhardy arguments only damage the side from which they emanate.
Production Values: The script for Sanjuro gets a bit complicated at times and heavy on exposition, but it compensates with a thorough sprinkling of good humor. The nine young samurai sometimes come across as nine kimono-clad stooges, engaging in impulsive but mechanized activities. Viewers get to watch Sanjura smarting after being chided by the old woman, which is good fun indeed. The cinematography builds from the usual Kurosawa deep focus technique, permitting multiple planes of activity. The ensemble scenes are superbly choreographed and composed. Criterion provides a stellar image transfer for their DVD.
The performance here by Toshirô Mifune is restrained, by his standards, and all the more to my liking for being so. At his best, he's an amazing screen presence. His other work for Kurosawa included Stray Dog (1949), Rashômon (1950), The Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961), and High and Low (1963). He also appeared in the Samurai trilogy, beginning with Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto, and in Chushingura (1962). The other standout performances in Sanjuro were turned in by Takako Irie as the Chamberlain's wife and Tatsuya Nakadai as the rival samurai. Nakadai later worked for Kurosawa in High and Low (1963), Kagemusha (1980), and Ran (1985).
Comparison with Yojimbo: Debating the relative merits of sequels vs. originals is a favorite pastime of film buffs and very much so in relation to Sanjuro vs. Yojimbo. In adding my two-cents worth to the debate, I have to make a distinction between the merits of the films as works of art versus my personal enjoyment of each. In my judgment, Yojimbo is the more original of the two, provides more interesting secondary characters, and is more darkly satirical, but Sanjuro was nevertheless a good deal more enjoyable for me personally.
The Sanjuro character in Yojimbo was not a character that I could admire in the slightest. Certainly, he was a skilled warrior, but at times he would kill for no better reason than to advertise his skills to potential bidders. He took amusement in manipulating the opposing factions of townspeople into mutual annihilation. I thought that the Sake seller in that film hit the nail on the head when he said to Sanjuro, “Everybody’s crazy! But you’re even crazier!” Idiots that kill one another out of ignorance are crazy, but inciting idiots to kill one another for amusement or profit is even crazier! Here in Sanjuro, we have a worthy hero instead of the antihero that he was in the prequel. After the Chamberlain's wife implores him, "Please don't use too much violence," Sanjuro does his best to accommodate her wish. When he is forced to slaughter a roomful of the enemy soldiers because of the mistrust of his young colleagues, he slaps the three hard when the fighting is over, telling them, "You forced me to kill again." Later, Sanjuro tries his best to talk his chief rival, Hanbei Muroto, out of a showdown that would culminate in the death of one or the other.
This is a wiser and nobler character than the Sanjuro of the earlier film. He evaluates his own actions in light of the chastisement of the Chamberlain's wife. There's also a touch of chivalry in his actions in Sanjuro that was sorely lacking in Yojimbo. He offers himself as a footstool to help the women over a wall during an escape and agrees on the delicate camellia petals as the signal for his associates to attack, in order to please the aesthetic wishes of the ladies. In Sanjuro, Mifune's character is fighting for a cause out of honor and to support the idealistic, if incompetent, young samurai. I can root for a skilled warrior who's fighting for a just cause but not one who's fomenting violence just to wile the time away. At the end of Sanjuro, the title character instructs his young friends, "Go away or I am liable to kill you too." He has learned to regret the consequences of his commitment to the art of violence, which is far more personal insight and a deeper moral lesson than Yojimbo even begins to approach.
Both films have more comedy built in than you'll find in the typical Kurosawa film, but, for me, the comedy in Sanjuro works better. I said when I reviewed Yojimbo that what was supposed to pass for humor struck me as just plain ridiculous. In Sanjuro, the only part of the humor that sometimes lapses into the ridiculous is the incessant stupidity of the young samurai. I think it would have added a nice touch if Kurosawa had allowed them one instance of unexpected competence near the end of the film, together with a look of surprise and grudging respect from Sanjuro. The most effective comic bit in Sanjuro relates to a prisoner, who periodically pops out of a closet to join his captors in discussion or celebration and, then, remembering his status, returns to the closet where he's being confined. Sanjuro is more thoroughly tongue-in-cheek, while its predecessor film was too often mean-spirited. The grotesque fools of Yojimbo are replaced here with adorable ones.
Bottom-Line: Kurosawa has given us a whole bouquet of cinematic blossoms over the years and here he's sent one more camellia petal down the stream for our delight. It's not as much a complete masterpiece of some of his other work, but it's richly entertaining. The extras that come with the Criterion DVD are minimal. There's the theatrical trailer and an interesting essay by film critic Michael Sragow, but not much else. Sanjuro is in Japanese with English subtitles and has a brisk running time of 96 minutes.
*************************************************************************************************
You might want to check out these other excellent films from Japan:
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.