So, as part of my ongoing project to have Netflix send me every Akira Kurosawa film ever made, I watched Yojimbo last night.

Yojimbo was a great film - very clever and very funny in places. The basic plot is that a wandering samurai (Sanjuro) comes into a town where two gangs are fighting, and decides to wipe them both out by setting them against each other. I knew that Yojimbo has been remade as A Fistful of Dollars and as Last Man Standing, but I didn't know that Yojimbo was itself an uncredited adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett novel, Red Harvest. Phew! There's a whole lot of uncredited adaptation going on. (According to IMDB, Kurosawa and Kikushima, the screenwriters for Yojimbo were given a story credit for Last Man Standing, but they were uncredited in A Fistful of Dollars.)

Cinema may be the best illustration ever of Lionel Trilling's claim that "Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."

Alas, the Yojimbo DVD comes with no commentary track. It does come with the (US?) theatrical trailer, which is pretty amusing, because it goes to great lengths to make the movie seem to be one big showdown between Unosuke (brother of the head of one of the two gangster gangs, who takes great delight in being the only person in town to own a pistol.) Unosuke really is the most interesting villain of the piece, because he's the only person smart enough to figure out Sanjuro's game and give him some serious trouble. But the trailer really exaggerated his importance - there's a scene near the end of the film, which is basically the big showdown. It cuts back and forth between Sanjuro walking slowly down the main street towards the center of town, and a whole bunch of gangster goons, with Unosuke in the front rank, coming towards the center of town from the other direction. In the trailer, they actually edited out the other goons, so that it just looks like a big showdown between Sanjuro and Unosuke. Silly people!

Anyway, I'm off to go rearrange my Netflix queue. Have a great Sunday everyone.