Sanjuro (1962)

Official trailer

Sanjuro is Akira Kurosawa’s 1962 Japanese samurai film and the sequel to Yojimbo (1961). The film depicts wandering ronin Sanjuro Tsubaki encountering nine young samurai who have decided to expose corruption in their clan. Sanjuro recognizes their plan as catastrophically naive and forces them to accept his guidance through the resulting conspiracy. The young samurai must rescue their kidnapped chamberlain, identify which clan elders are corrupt, and keep superior swordsmen, including the ronin Hanbei Muroto, from killing them. Toshiro Mifune plays Sanjuro Tsubaki. Tatsuya Nakadai plays Hanbei Muroto.

Yuzo Kayama plays young samurai Iori. Yunosuke Ito plays the elder Mutsuta. Takashi Shimura plays the elder Kurofuji. Kamatari Fujiwara plays the elder Takebayashi. Reiko Dan plays Mutsuta’s daughter. Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, and Akira Kurosawa wrote the screenplay from Shugoro Yamamoto’s source novel. Kurosawa Productions and Toho produced the film on a budget right for Toho’s studio production scale, and it was Toho’s highest-grossing film of 1962.

Sanjuro might be the funniest samurai film ever made, and I think it’s better company than Yojimbo. Mifune scratches, naps and grumbles his way through a room full of earnest young idiots, and I laugh out loud at him while still believing he could cut down anyone in the frame. Then the ending hits like a slap across the face.

Kurosawa and Mifune’s second ronin film, Sanjuro, is the conclusion of the brief two-film series that began with Yojimbo. The film works more comedically than Yojimbo while preserving the cynical samurai protagonist Mifune had set the previous year. The naive young samurai provide foil for Sanjuro’s experienced criticism of conventional bushido idealism. The film’s famous closing duel between Sanjuro and Hanbei produces approximately three seconds of action that ends with one of the largest blood-splatter effects in samurai cinema. The picture influenced later samurai films and other action productions.

Kurosawa’s continuing partnership with Mifune across multiple productions including Yojimbo, Sanjuro, The Hidden Fortress, Throne of Blood, and additional films ranks among the great director-performer collaborations in cinema history.

The Sanjuro-Hanbei Duel

The film’s closing duel between Sanjuro and ronin Hanbei lasts approximately three seconds of actual blade contact. Both men draw. Sanjuro’s cut takes Hanbei first.

Blood erupts in a vertical fountain that arcs across the screen for significant visual impact. The blood quantity had no precedent in Japanese samurai cinema. This required a hidden pressurized blood tube that an offstage operator activated on cue.

The closing duel has been imitated extensively. Later samurai productions and other action films have continued to deploy the brief-action followed by extensive-blood approach. Quentin Tarantino has cited the Sanjuro duel as direct influence on the climactic sequences in Kill Bill (2003-2004). The work reveals how brief action can produce stronger impact than extended combat when the surrounding setup builds sufficient tension. The careful preparation across the runtime makes the three-second duel work where conventional extended combat would have lost impact through screen time.

That duel is three seconds I’d put up against any action scene in cinema. After a whole film of Sanjuro talking his way around fights, the two men stand there forever, and then the blood hits and it’s a shock every bit as big as Kurosawa wanted.

The Naive Samurai

Nine young samurai believe they’ve identified corruption in their clan and that their plan to expose it will succeed through good intentions and bushido principle. Sanjuro recognizes immediately that their conspiracy targets the wrong elder and that their methods will get them killed. He spends most of the runtime preventing them from acting on their idealistic certainty while executing the actual plan that will accomplish their goals.

The contrast between Sanjuro’s experienced cynicism and the young samurai idealism gives the film thematic content beyond conventional samurai action.

Kurosawa argued that conventional bushido idealism produces predictable defeats that experienced practitioners recognize and exploit. The young samurai have absorbed the cultural ideology without understanding how the ideology works in practice. Sanjuro understands. He protects them from their idealism while accomplishing what their idealism aimed at. The pattern of experienced practitioners protecting idealists from themselves has continued in films that came after.

The young samurai are a riot, and I think they’re the smartest choice in the film. Whenever they huddle up to agree on something noble and stupid, Sanjuro rolls his eyes, and the film takes his side without ever making the boys contemptible. Kurosawa likes these kids, and so do I.

Mifune as Sanjuro

Toshiro Mifune plays Sanjuro with the controlled scratching, sleeping, and irritable mannerisms that the character had developed in Yojimbo. Mifune wears the same gray kimono.

He carries the same swords. His characteristic shoulder-rolling movement remains. The performance continues the character that Yojimbo had established instead of developing it. Audiences who recognized Sanjuro from the previous film received continuity that conventional sequel construction would have damaged through unnecessary character modification.

Mifune is the whole reason this sequel works for me. He doesn’t reinvent Sanjuro at all, same gray kimono, same shoulder roll, and I’m grateful, because I’d have been furious if anybody had sanded the edges off that grumpy, dangerous man.

Mifune’s career-long collaboration with Kurosawa across sixteen films including Sanjuro ranks among the great director-performer partnerships in cinema history. The collaboration ended after Red Beard (1965) due to professional and personal conflicts that have been documented in later biographies. Mifune continued working extensively without Kurosawa for the later three decades. Kurosawa continued working without Mifune. The two careers worked separately after 1965 without producing additional joint work. Sustained collaborations sometimes end despite continuing capacity in both contributors.

Does Sanjuro still hold up?

I give Sanjuro a 9, and I think it beats Yojimbo, which is rare praise for a sequel made because the studio asked for one. The closing duel proves three seconds can outhit ten minutes of swordplay, the naive samurai give the film a lighter touch than its predecessor, and Mifune picks up the character exactly where he left him. Essential viewing for anyone interested in samurai cinema, in Kurosawa’s filmography, or in sequels that work at a higher level than their originals.

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