![]() ![]() There are a couple of times when this is averted, though: once when a thug gets cut up in an alleyway and blood spurts from his body almost immediately, and again when Unosuke has been slashed to bits and is very visibly bleeding out. During the fights, you won't see any wounds (except for one instance of Sanjūrō cutting off a guy's arm) and the swords often seem to slash nothing but air. As for Sanjuro, he may have conned some gold out of the gangs before wiping them out, but in the end he's still just a wandering ronin with little to his name but the clothes on his back and the sword at his waist. Bittersweet Ending: The town is free of the gangs, but thanks to how badly the war had escalated before the end, there isn't much left of the town, with the restaurateur and the cooper, and the Dirty Cop Hansuke being the only depicted adult males still alive and sane.Big Bad: While Seibei is as evil as he is, Ushitora is the one who started the gang war. ![]() Batman Gambit: Sanjūrō is able to destroy the two rival gangs by exploiting their leaders' personalities and the fact that both of them desperately want his skills."I guess there is no cure for stupidity except for death." note Which translates to "30-year-old mulberry field", so his real name remains a mystery.Īn enormously influential film, it has had at least three direct remakes - Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (as a Western), Walter Hill's Last Man Standing (1996) (as a mob movie) and Albert Pyun's Omega Doom (as a sci-fi movie) - as well as homages in numerous other films and television shows, including being the inspiration for John Belushi's Samurai character on Saturday Night Live. When asked about his name, he looks at a mulberry field and answers "Kuwabatake Sanjūrō". His method is simple, yet clever: he reduces the number of gangsters in the town by getting the two rival factions to go to war, then mops up the remainder. It stars Toshiro Mifune as a wandering rōnin who arrives in a town beset by criminals and decides to clean the place up (apparently for fun and profit). “I just love the notion of almost like a documentary look at the 24 hours between when (Emperor) Hirohito decided to surrender and then when he was going to make the radio announcement, by which point it would be too late to go back,” said Filipi, who has not previously seen the rarely screened film.Yojimbo (Yōjinbō, 用心棒, meaning "bodyguard") is a 1961 Jidaigeki film directed by Akira Kurosawa, loosely based on Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest. Mifune plays Minister of War Korechika Anami. The final film to be shown will be among the most intriguing: “ Japan’s Longest Day,” showing May 26, offers Japan’s perspective of its surrender to the Allies in World War II. The series will continue with “ The Last Gunfight,” starring Mifune as a police detective, on Tuesday “ Samurai Assassin,” in which the actor plays, well, just that, next Thursday and “ Red Lion,” a comedy with the actor masquerading as a high-ranking army officer, on May 19. ![]() “It’s like two of the most famous sword-wielding characters in Japanese cinema.” “‘Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo’ feels pretty contemporary (with) violent sword-fighting scenes, but then lots of humor kind of blended in,” Filipi said. ![]() One exception is Thursday’s film: “ Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo” can be streamed via the Criterion Channel, but the movie, like all of the others in the series, will be shown on a 35mm print at the Wexner Center. Instead of featuring Mifune’s famous films with Kurosawa - including universally praised masterpieces such as “Seven Samurai,” “Throne of Blood” and “Yojimbo” - Wexner officials decided to focus on the actor’s work with Okamoto, a prolific maker of mainstream Japanese cinema who didn’t have the cachet of some of his colleagues. “He just reached out to some of his friends in the field and said, ‘Hey, I just want to let you guys all know that we have this coming up and the prints will be here.’” “(The Film Forum’s) programmer, Bruce Goldstein, was working with the Japan Foundation to bring quite a few rare prints over to the U.S.,” said David Filipi, director of film/video at the Wexner Center. The local series piggybacks on a more exhaustive retrospective that took place in February and March at the noted Film Forum movie theater in New York.Ĭinema Columbus festival: Hometown filmmakers to showcase comedy-drama at Southern Theatre He added: “He had everything you could want in a movie star, and I would rank him among the greatest anywhere.” ![]()
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