By the time he made Yojimbo in 1961, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa had already forever entangled the lineage of the American Western and their Eastern equivalent, the jidai-geki (period films about samurai). The year before, his Western-inspired masterpiece Seven Samurai (1954) had been remade by John Sturges as The Magnificent Seven, an American Western that needed to change little more than the scenery. The even more explicitly Western-inspired Yojimbowas famously remade three years later by Italian director Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the first of the “Man With No Name” trilogy starring Clint Eastwood. And Yojimbo itself, which is credited as an original story, is rumored to have been loosely based on Budd Boetticher’s Buchanan Rides Out (1958), in which a lone gunslinger gets caught in the middle of a family feud in a California border town (it is also said to have been inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest).

Yojimbohas a similar plot to both Boetticher’s film and Hammett’s novel, except that it takes place in a small Japanese village at the end of the Tokugawa Period (around the late 1860s). The presence of Boetticher is certainly felt, although the American filmmaker who seems most directly influential is Boetticher’s mentor, John Ford, particularly his wry combination of myth and dark humor, not to mention his penchant for broadly drawn characters and humorous situations involving alcohol. The secondary characters in Yojimbo would probably feel right at home next to John Wayne in Stagecoach (1939).

The protagonist of Yojimbo is a nameless samurai (Toshiro Mifune in his 12th collaboration with Kurosawa) who wanders into the middle of a boiling standoff between two rival gangs. We get the first sign that something is deeply wrong in the quiet village when the samurai is met not by a person, but by a dog happily trotting down the town’s main street with a dismembered human hand clutched in his mouth—a humorously gruesome, nearly surreal image that immediately sets the tone for things to come and is rightly one of the most famous in all of Kurosawa’s films. The rival gangs are led by Tazaemon (Kamatari Fujiwara), the local silk merchant, and Seibei (Seizaburô Kawazu), the town’s sake brewer. Each is vying for control of the village and has slowly amassed an army of thugs and criminals. The entire town has all but shut down as a result.

The wily samurai, who eventually adopts the name Sanjuro Kuwabatake after looking out at a mulberry field (his name literally means “30-year-old mulberry field”), decides to stick around and manipulate the two sides to his own advantage. This is a bold narrative move, as it aligns the audience with a ruthless antihero who works exclusively for his own benefit (although this does not always preclude acts of decency). Sanjuro is a cunning manipulator who sees a desperate situation and realizes that he can milk it to his own benefit. But, because he is played by Toshiro Mifune, an established star of great physical dexterity and comedic ability, Sanjuro is never as despicable as his character would seem.

Sanjuro’s primary rival is Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), who arrives one day bearing a weapon—a pistol—that puts him at a great advantage. The presence of the iconic firearm, the first ever seen in the small village (most people don’t even know what it is), firmly aligns Yojimbo with the Western and allows Kurosawa to play with the boundary between East and West. The gun’s ability to kill from a distance depersonalizes the violence, which Kurosawa highlights with a graphic intensity rarely seen in films before. When people are cut down in Yojimbo, blood spatters, and one surprising scene shows Sanjuro cutting off an opponent’s arm.

It isn’t surprising that Kurosawa gravitated toward arterial spray given his penchant for exaggerated naturalism. Like many of his earlier films, Yojimbo is awash in the thundering intensity of nature in the raw. It doesn’t just rain; it pours. When the wind blows, it sends plumes of dust into the air taller than the village’s buildings, creating the palpable sensation of being inside a literal and emotional tempest. The ’Scope cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa (who also shot films for Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi) emphasizes the intensity even more, giving us vast wide shots in which nature seems to be exploding all around the amassing army-gangs. While Yojimbo might not be one of Kurosawa’s most thematically accomplished or narratively complex samurai films, it is certainly one of his most visually ravishing, and that alone justifies its place in the pantheon of great action films.

Yojimbo Criteron Collection 4K UHD + Blu-ray
Yojimbo is available as part of the Criterion Collection’s Yojimbo / Sanjuro: Two Samurai Films by Akira Kurosawa four-disc box set.
Aspect Ratio	2.39:1 (both films)
Audio	Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 3.0 surround (both films) Japanese Linear PCM 1.0 monaural (both films)
Subtitles	English
Supplements	Yojimbo Audio commentary by film scholar Stephen Prince Documentary on the making of Yojimbo, part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create Theatrical trailer Teaser trailer Stills gallery of behind-the-scenes photos Insert booklet featuring an essay by critic Alexander Sesonske and notes from Kurosawa and his cast and crew Sanjuro Audio commentary by film scholar Stephen Prince Documentary on the making of Sanjuro, part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create Theatrical trailer Teaser trailer Stills gallery of behind-the-scenes photos Insert booklet featuring an essay by critic Michael Sragow and notes and statements from Kurosawa and his cast and crew
Distributor	The Criterion Collection
Release Date	January 7, 2025
COMMENTS
This four-disc set marks the fourth release of Yojimbo and Sanjuro by the Criterion Collection, following severely compromised 1999 nonanamorphic DVDs and then the two-film DVD boxset from 2007 and Blu-ray boxset from 2010, which featured new, anamorphic transfers. Now finally available in high definition, Criterion’s long-awaited new 4K UHD releases of both Yojimbo and Sanjuro boast images that derives from brand-new 4K scans of the original 35mm camera negatives for both films (the previous DVDs and Blu-rays were transferred from 35mm fine-grain master positives and were slightly windowboxed). The resulting images on both films are absolutely superb, with a notable increase in sharpness and excellent detail. The new 4K transfers really emphasize the contrast in the images, with solid blacks and nuanced grays, and digital restoration has removed virtually all signs of age and wear. In terms of sound, the discs offer two options on each film: a Linear PCM monaural soundtrack or a DTS-HD Master Audio three-channel surround mix that beautifully replicates the films’ original aural presentation via Perspecta Stereophonic sound. The Perspecta soundtracks were mastered from the 35mm original soundtrack negatives, while the monaural tracks were remastered from the 35mm optical tracks. All the supplements are the same as we saw on 2007 DVD and 2010 Blu-ray releases. Both films feature individual audio commentaries by the late film scholar Stephen Prince, author of Warrior’s Cinema, one of the preeminent scholarly works on Kurosawa. As he has on several other Criterion commentaries, including Kurosawa’s Red Beard (1964) and Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), Prince provides lively and deeply informative commentaries on Yojimbo and Sanjuro (few scholars on commentary tracks sound as excited to talk about the film as Prince does). In addition to illuminating Kurosawa’s aesthetics, Prince gives a great deal of background on Japanese culture and history that puts the films into a better context for Western viewers. In addition to the commentary, Criterion has also included episodes from the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create about the productions of the two films. The documentaries feature interviews with Kurosawa and a number of members of the cast and crew, each of whom has an interesting anecdote to tell about making the film. Also on each disc is a stills gallery of behind-the-scenes photos and two theatrical trailers. Each disc also comes with a perfect-bound insert booklet with essays and notes from Kurosawa and his cast and crew.

Copyright © 2025 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Criterion Collection