YOJIMBO in 35mm
[YŌJINBŌ] [用心棒]
Tough guy Sanjūrō (Toshirō Mifune), an out-of-work, down-on-his-luck samurai, wanders into a lawless town beset by gang warfare and quickly finds his services much in demand by both factions. His response is to cynically play each side against the other — strange for a samurai but befitting filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s reputed source materials, Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled pulp novels “Red Harvest” and “The Glass Key.” Tatsuya Nakadai — maniacal and oh-so-good in his first major role in a Kurosawa picture — plays a gun-toting gangster convinced that his deadly Western weapon can best Sanjūrō’s sword. With its unprecedented mix of cartoon violence and sardonic humor, the film has had an influence that is hard to overstate, from Sergio Leone’s remake A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and the entire spaghetti western genre of the 1960s to latter-day Tarantino-style postmodernist pastiches. DIR/SCR/PROD Akira Kurosawa; SCR/PROD Ryūzō Kikushima; PROD Tomoyuki Tanaka. Japan, 1961, b&w, 110 min. In Japanese with English subtitles. NOT RATED
In Memoriam: Tatsuya Nakadai (1932–2025)
Run Time: 110 Minutes
Opening Date: Friday, July 10, 2026
Genre: Action thriller
35mm Film