MOVIE CHRONICLE
BODY AND SOUL
Kurosawa has made the first great shaggy-man movie.
Yojimbo
(The Bodyguard) is a comedy-satire of force: the story of the
bodyguard who kills the bodies he is hired to guard. Our Westerner,
the freelance professional gunman, the fastest draw in the West, has
become the unemployed samurai; the gun for hire has become the
sword for hire. But when our Westerner came into town, although his
own past was often shady, he picked the
right
side, the farmers against
the gamblers and cattle thieves, the side of advancing law and order
and decency and schools and churches. Toshiro Mifune, the samurai
without a master, the professional killer looking for employment, walks
into a town divided by two rival merchants quarreling over a gambling
concession, each supporting a gang of killers. The hero is the Westerner
all right, the stranger in town, the disinterested outsider with his special
skills and the remnants of :a code of behavior, but to whom can he
give his allegiance? Nobody represents any principle, the scattered weak
are simply weak.
The Westerner has walked into the gangster movie: both sides
are treacherous and ruthless (trigger-happy, they would be called in
Americ:an pictures). He hires out to each and systematically eliminates
both. He is the agent of their destruction because they offend his sense
of how things should be: he destroys them because they disgust him.
This black Robin Hood with his bemused contempt is more treacherous
than the gangsters; he can defend his code only by a masterly use
of the doublecross, and he enjoys himself with an occasional spree of
demolition ("Destruction's our delight"). The excruciating humor of
his last line, as he surveys the c:arnage-"Now there'll be a little quiet
in this town"-is that we've heard it so many times before, but not
