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July 17, 2018

Episode 373: Yojimbo (1961)

Guest Co-Hosts: Jordan Blossey, Eric Cohen

Released in 1961, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo was an international sensation and put jettisoned star Toshiro Mifune into the pantheon of cinematic badasses. It’s the story of merchants who manipulate two factions of gangsters in a small town. Our main character -- a man with no name -- comes to the town and after sizing things up decides that he’ll make a bit of money playing both sides against one another. Along the way we discover that perhaps he’s not the unscrupulous amoral bastard he pretends to be.

Eric Cohen and Jordan Blossey join Mike to discuss Yojimbo, it's sequel Sanjuro and a few other "Yojimbo movies" as well as Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars, Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, Walter Hill's Last Man Standing and a raft of other similar films.

Listen/Download Now:

Links:
Buy Yojimbo & Sanjuro on Blu-Ray
Buy the Man with No Name trilogy on Blu-Ray
Buy Red Harvet by Dashiell Hammett
Read more about Hammett's Corkscrew
Buy Hammett: A Life on the Edge by William F. Nolan
Read about Machibuse: Incident at Blood Pass
Four Artists and a Man with No Name by Scherpschutter
West Meets East by Alexander Sesonske
A Comparison of 'Yojimbo', 'A Fistful of Dollars' and 'Last Man Standing'

Music:
Yojimbo Score - Masaru Satoh
A Fistful of Dollars Score - Ennio Morricone

Watch:












1 comment:

  1. Nice episode on Yojimbo. But I was struck how you missed that Eastwood's character is totally different from Mifune's. Eastwood is heartless trash who does one nice thing, while Mifune has a moral purpose in wanting to rid the town of the gangsters. And why does everyone still refer to Eastwood as the "man with no name"? he has a name in both Dollar movies. The only place he doesn't have a name is the PR movie posters. Stop it already.
    I was glad to hear from your guest that "For a few dollars more" is really a LVC movie and Eastwood is really a supporting role. Finally somebody gets that!
    I like in the commentary for Sanjuro the idea that Yojimbo and Sanjuro can be played in reverse order as Sanjuro is really not a "sequel," which makes the story all the more intriguing. Sergio was style over substance, so the Dollar films can hardly compete there, but oh what style!

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