A DVD copy of Sanjuro was gifted to me. If I had purchased a hard copy myself, I definitely would never have skipped buying Yojimbo, the first in the pair of films about Sanjuro, the ronin who names himself “30 years old”. Sanjuro is a film for the those–investors and samurai fans alike–who wanted more from Kurosawa’s creation. The success of Yojimbo created the desire for a sequel, and Kurosawa repurposed an old script to have Toshiro Mifune and other players, like Tatsuya Nakadai, continue the adventure.
Much like how I feel when watching a Mizoguchi film, a Kurosawa film is comforting because it is so well crafted. One does not watch Sanjuro to see what can happen if continuity is thrown out the window. Rather, one seeks a film like this because it demonstrates how, in the hands of an expert, a so-called “straightforward” style of story-telling is not an impediment to radical creation. In the realm of fiction, James Clavell’s Shōgun is the first cousin of a Kurosawa film; the former is dedicated to observing the action of characters from third person, but the precision of its description allows for different layers of a feudal system to be folded into one complex picture.
The funny thing about praising the style of Sanjuro is that one can, with a small push from Stephen Prince’s audio commentary, read the film as Kurosawa telling the next generation of Japanese filmmakers they made a mistake to reject the Japanese cinema Kurosawa helped create. Not for lack of enthusiasm, the young samurai in the film fail to read almost every political maneuver that is taking place. Consequently, Mifune’s exposition is not just for the audience–Sajnuro has to tell his own allies that, if he was a less capable swordsman, his head would be cut off by their hands and from their blind stupidity.
notes on cinema 