Cinema: A Japanese Apocalypse

Yojimbo. In the movies, where every man is a genius until proven otherwise, only one director of recent years has not been proven otherwise: Japan's Akira Kurosawa. In Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood he displayed formidable powers as a moralist, an ironist, a calligraphist of violence. In Ikiru, one of cinema's rare great works of art. he revealed a rugged realism, an exquisite humanity, a sense for what is sublime in being human. Now. in a movie that is both a wow of a show and a masterpiece of misanthropy, Kurosawa emerges as a bone-cracking satirist who with red-toothed glee chews out his century as no dramatist has done since Bertolt Brecht.

The satire is blithely disguised. Contemporary civilization is reduced to a microcosm: a small Japanese town of the last century. And the story is presented as a phlebotomously funny parody of a Hollywood western. When the film begins, the town is divided, just as the modern world is divided, into two armed camps. In each of them, like a land-grabbing cattleman surrounded by gunmen, sits a vicious little warlord surrounded by swordsmen. Enter the hero (Toshiro Mifune), a strong, silent, shabby samurai whose sword is for hire and no questions asked. He looks the situation over: sheriff bullied, citizens cowed, streets full of corpses, business at a standstill. Grimly he reflects: "Better if all these men were dead."

Well, why not? With grisly delight the samurai sells his sword to the first warlord, promptly betrays him to the second. Three men dead. Then he betrays the second to the first. Nine men dead. Then he provokes both sides to a pitched battle. Twenty or 30 men dead and the town in ruins. By hook or crook, trick or treat, the samurai assists the slaughter until, hilariously or horribly, everybody has eliminated everybody. With a grunt of solid satisfaction, the hero survevs the vacant village and declares: "Now we'll have a little quiet in this town." At this point, many customers will be wondering whether to laugh or scream. On second thoughts, most of them will decide to scream. Taken entire, Yojimbo is an appalling assault on the human animal and all his works. Of the scores of characters in the film, only five can pretend to be human beings. What's more, three of the five are stupid and cowardly, and the best of them, the noblest instance of mankind that Kurosawa can discover, is the mercenary samurai—a professional killer. Everybody else in the picture is lecherous, treacherous, venal or criminally insane.

Moral: Humanity, drop dead! Humanity may not take Kurosawa's advice, but anybody who sees this picture will be shaken by it. Rage like a gale, action like an avalanche roar out of the screen, leveling all resistance. The scenes are short, the story swift, the cutting terse. Like a giant cauldron the screen boils with life, and Kurosawa's telescopic lenses, spooning deep, lift the depths to the surface and hurl the whole mess at the spectator's face. All the players play with succussive intensity, but Mifune, a magnificent athlete-actor, dominates the scene.