Yojimbo
- Jun 17
- 2 min read
One of my favorite authors is Dashiell Hammett, a master of hardboiled suspense and detective fiction. The Maltese Falcon is his most famous creation. But his first novel Red Harvest is legendary in its own right.
Hammett’s novel is about a nameless private detective whose job brings him to a small town that’s overrun by crime and corruption thanks to two rival gangs. As the detective begins to clean-up the town, in a clever twist he doesn’t do it on his own, but by manipulating the two gangs into eliminating each other for him.
Over the years, this core idea has been used by filmmakers around the world, most without acknowledging a debt to Hammett. Miller’s Crossing by the Coen brothers is one example. So is Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing, starring Bruce Willis. One film critic counts about 15 action movies that have Red Harvest in their DNA. In my opinion, whatever the number, the best film version is the classic Japanese movie Yojimbo.
In no time, Mifune uses his lightning-fast skill with his samurai sword to get hired as a bodyguard for one of the gangs.
Made in 1961 and directed by the great Akira Kurosawa, Yojimbo is set in feudal Japan, and the nameless man is played by Kurosawa’s favorite actor Toshiro Mifune. In the film, Mifune is not a detective but a wandering samurai looking for work as a Yojimbo, the Japanese word for “bodyguard”. He arrives at a village where two criminal factions have taken control and the villagers are suffering. In no time, Mifune uses his lightning-fast skill with his samurai sword to get hired as a bodyguard by one of the gangs. Before long, the other gang hires him too. And then, before you know it, Mifune is playing the two gangs off each other, all for his own profit. But when one of the families in the village is threatened, the mercenary samurai has a chance to show whether he might have a heart after all.
While Kurosawa admitted getting ideas for Yojimbo from one of Hammett’s other books, he denied using Red Harvest. Whatever the truth, with Yojimbo he succeeded in creating his own version of a classic American gangster story; one that’s also filled with images that clearly evoke Kurosawa’s love of another movie genre: the Hollywood western. At times, his camera frames Mifune almost as if he’s Wyatt Earp facing bad guys on the dusty, windblown streets of Tombstone.
It’s no wonder then that Italian director Sergio Leone was so inspired when he saw Yojimbo that he decided to copy it—verbatim—for his first Clint Eastwood western, A Fistful of Dollars. Kurosawa sued Leone for plagiarism and he won. Poor Hammett should have sued too. But it didn’t matter. He was dead by then anyway.
I give Yojimbo four out of four stars. It’s an East meets West action classic.
