Yojimbo

(Akira Kurosawa, Japan 1961, 110 min., DCP, Japanese with English subtitles)

After digesting Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, Kurosawa spit out this tight masterwork of samurai cinema. Sanjuro (Kurosawa's muse Toshiro Mifune), an amoral loner and cocky sword-for-hire, comes to town to line up work skewering thugs, but after recoiling at the grotesque corruption of the village's two rival underhanded gangland machines, he endeavors to exterminate them both. Inspiring Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars as well as other remakes, none of them have the inspired eastern/western score devised by the ingenious Masaru Sato.