A wandering, samurai-for-hire (Mifune, in his quintessential role) arrives in a village eager to earn money through his thug-skewering skills. Disturbed by the grotesque corruption of the town’s two powerful rival gangs, he endeavors to exterminate them both. Kurosawa’s action-packed swordplay epic owes a debt to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and American westerns, and Yojimbo in turn inspired Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. “The samurai could be a gunslinger, and the local characters could have been lifted from John Ford’s gallery of supporting actors” (Roger Ebert).
