One of the first people Sanjuro meets in the town is the coffin-maker, and there is a nice moment when he first goes out to do battle and advises him, 'Two coffins.

Occasionally, he kills people in cold blood, just to prove that he can, in events leading up to a final bloodbath. The gun provides Unosuke with a sneaky kind of self-confidence, and he produces the weapon gloatingly from time to time. This upsets the balance of power and tilts against Sanjuro's plans, which depend on his skill as a swordsman who can kill any number of the others without being wounded himself. (Eastwood, in the Leone movies, always keeps one hand under his poncho.) When Unosuke finally reveals one of his hands, it holds a pistol - the first one seen in the village. The samurai often walk about with their empty sleeves flapping at the sides, their arms folded inside their kimonos. 'In this town, I'll get paid for killing,' he muses, 'and this town would be better off if they were dead.' His planning is upset by the unexpected appearance of Unosuke ( Tatsuya Nakadai), the younger brother of one of the sake dealer's bodyguards. Sanjuro's strategy is an elaborate chess game in which he is playing for neither side but plans instead to upset the board. Disloyal to his employer? Yes, but early in the film, he is offered 50 ryo by one of the leaders, only to overhear the man's wife telling him, 'We'd save the whole 50 ryo if we killed him after he wins.' Sanjuro, employed by the side that kidnapped them, kills their six guards, frees them, tears up a house to make it look like there was a fierce struggle, and blames it on the other side. A farmer and his wife, possibly the only two good people in the town, are kidnapped. His amorality is so complete that we are a little startled when he performs a good deed. His strategy is to hire himself out as a yojimbo to first one side and then the other, and do no actual bodyguarding at all. Indeed, in a crucial early scene, as the two sides face each other nervously from either end of the street and dart forward fearfully in gestures of attack, Sanjuro sits high above the action in the central bell tower, looks down and is vastly amused. Richie, whose writings on Kurosawa are invaluable, notes that Kurosawa's shots are always at right angles to what they show they either look straight up and down the street, or straight into or out of the buildings, and 'there are very few diagonal shots.' The purpose may be to emphasize the simplicity of the local situation: Two armies face each other, the locals observe the main street as if it's a stage, and the samurai himself embodies the diagonal - the visitor who stands at an angle to everyone and upsets the balance of power. In between, the townspeople cower behind closed shutters and locked doors, and the film's visuals alternate between the emptiness of the windswept street, shots looking out through the slats of shutters and the chinks in walls, and shots from outdoors showing people peering through their shutters. There is the silk dealer and the sake merchant, both with private armies, who occupy headquarters at either end of the town. He needs money and so presumably must hire himself out as a bodyguard to one of the two warring factions. Sanjuro's strategy is to create great interest about himself while keeping his motives obscure. That brings him to the town, to possible employment, and to a situation that differs from Hollywood convention in that the bad guys are not attacking the good guys because there are no good guys: 'There is,' the critic Donald Richie observes, 'almost no one in the whole town who for any conceivable reason is worth saving.' It's said Kurosawa's inspiration was Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest, in which a private eye sets one gang against another. We see Sanjuro at a crossroads, throwing a stick into the air and walking in the direction it points. The opening titles inform us that in 1860, after the collapse of the Tokugawa Dynasty, samurai were left unemployed and wandered the countryside in search of work.

Even Eastwood's Man With No Name is inspired, perhaps, by the samurai in 'Yojimbo.' Asked his name, the samurai looks out the window, sees a mulberry field, and replies, 'Kuwabatake Sanjuro,' which means '30-year-old mulberry field.' He is 30, and that is a way of saying he has no name.

Ironic, that having borrowed from the Western, Kurosawa inspired one: Sergio Leone's 'A Fistful of Dollars' (1964), with Clint Eastwood, is so similar to 'Yojimbo' that homage shades into plagiarism.

Yojimbo movie