Yojimbo - The bodyguard

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Movie
German title Yojimbo - The bodyguard
Original title Yōjimbō
Country of production Japan
original language Japanese
Publishing year 1961
length 106 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Akira Kurosawa
script Ryūzō Kikushima ,
Akira Kurosawa
production Akira Kurosawa
music Masaru Satō
camera Kazuo Miyagawa
cut Akira Kurosawa
occupation

Yojimbo - The bodyguard ( jap. 用心棒 , Yojimbo ) is a feature film by Akira Kurosawa from 1961. The pioneering and influential film contributed to the creation of the spaghetti Westerns in.

action

A Rōnin ( Toshirō Mifune ) arrives in a village where two rival entrepreneurs, the Ushi Torah and the Seibei , fight for rule and hire thugs. He quartered himself in a pub and observed the situation. Finally, he comes up with the plan to play the gangs off against each other with the aim that they wipe each other out. He kills three members of the Ushi Torah in an open fight and then offers his services to the Seibei. In the further course of the film, he then changes sides several times, as both gangs are convinced of his strength and want to achieve victory over the rivals with him.

Only the brother of the leader of the Ushi Torah, Unosuke ( Tatsuya Nakadai ), who returns from a trip in the course of the film, distrusts the Rōnin. He has also brought a revolver from his trip that gives him and his gang an advantage over their rivals who are only equipped with swords . The Ushi Torah can capture the Rōnin and defeat the Seibei. In the course of this fight, however, the Rōnin can free himself and finally defeat Unosuke and the Ushi Torah in the final fight.

background

Yojimbo contains many elements of the classic western , but enriches them with a great deal of cruelty and morally ambiguous characters, above all the bodyguard himself. Not least because of this, the film became the template for the later spaghetti westerns .

Already in the opening sequence the myth of the upright hero is scratched in the truest sense of the word: The camera shows Mifune's back scratching himself in close-up. In the course of the plot, the good sides of the Rōnin such as generosity, helpfulness or a sense of justice are repeatedly contrasted with the negative such as cynicism and willingness to use violence. He thus represents the ideal “hero” for a world that has fallen apart, in which humans become animals. This is symbolized by a dog approaching Yojimbo from the village at the beginning of the film, a chopped off human hand in its mouth.

Through this pessimism , cynicism and the use of violence , the film set the style for the spaghetti western, which was founded by Sergio Leone 's remake For a Fistful of Dollars (1964) . Last Man Standing by Walter Hill is another remake of this classic Japanese. Kurosawa, in turn, was allegedly inspired by Dashiell Hammett 's American novel Red Harvest , which he himself always denied in interviews.

Reviews

“The film, shot with a great deal of virtuosity and a specific talent for image composition, impresses above all with its complexity: the high-tension drama of the fable mixes grotesque features and baroque exaggerations; the genre of samurai films seems to pass into its own parody here. "

- Ulrich Gregor in Die Zeit , 1961

“A masterful, cinematically and mentally consistently composed, sometimes bitterly ironic discourse about the narrow-mindedness of the powerful. With a clairvoyance that often appears cynical, but with a humanistic interest in knowledge, Kurosawa asks questions about the responsibility of the individual in the face of moral corruption and inhuman structures of rule in the guise of a cinematic action film . "

- Lexicon of international film

Awards

Yojimbo was nominated for an Oscar in the category Best Costume Design in 1962 , but could not prevail against The Sweet Life .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Yojimbo - The Bodyguard . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , September 2005 (PDF; test number: 103 745 DVD).
  2. ↑ Ulrich Gregor Philosophy has moved into the cinema . In: Die Zeit , No. 38/1961
  3. ↑ Yojimbo - The Bodyguard. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 28, 2016 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used