Yojimbo, Akira Kurosawa, 1961, 110 min.
In his wildly popular and influential Yojimbo, Kurosawa reimagined the period samurai film as a darkly comic if existential tale. Toshiro Mifune’s drifter, Sanjuro, is a masterless samurai who finds himself in the middle of a feud-torn Japanese village. Offering his services as yojimbo (bodyguard) to one faction and then the other, Sanjuro deftly manipulates the slaughter to come. A classic in Kurosawa’s oeuvre, Yojimbo provided the model for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and the nameless gunslinger who made Clint Eastwood a star.