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| Toshiro Mifune, Takako Irie, and Reiko Dan in Sanjuro |
Hanbei Muroto: Tatsuya Nakadai
The Spy: Keiju Kobayashi
Iori Izaka: Yuzo Kayama
Chidori: Reiko Dan
Kurofuji: Takashi Shimura
Takebayashi: Kamatari Fujiwara
Mutsuta's Wife: Takako Irie
Kikui: Masao Shimizu
Mutsuta: Yunosuke Ito
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Akira Kurosawa
Based on a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto
Cinematography: Fukuzo Koizumi, Takao Saito
Production design: Yoshiro Muraki
Music: Masaru Soto
Akira Kurosawa's tongue-in-cheek Sanjuro is not so much a sendup of samurai films as it is an effort to carry a genre to its logical and sometimes absurd extremes, the way the James Bond movies took spy films to a point of exciting but improbable and often comic point of no return. It reaches its peak in the final combat between Sanjuro and Hanbei, with an explosion of gore (produced by a pressurized hose that nearly knocked actor Tatsuya Nakadai off his feet) that's surprising and shocking but also very funny once you put it in the context of the usual bloodless deaths of samurai films. But Kurosawa has made us aware of the just-a-movie unreality of Sanjuro's action throughout, with his careful arrangements of the nine samurai under the spell of the sloppy ronin who calls himself "Sanjuro Tsubaki," which means something like "30-year-old camellia," a name he makes up on the spot. The not-so-magnificent nine are always grouping themselves for the camera, either in little triple triads or in chains that fill the widescreen. Their arrangements come to annoy Sanjuro so much that once, when they're trying to sneak up on someone, he tells them not to move in single file behind him: "We look like a centipede!" In addition to Mifune's irresistible scene-stealing, there's a delightful comic performance by Takako Irie as Mutsuta's wife, dithery and concerned with propriety, but also with a fund of commonsense that Sanjuro wisely heeds. Tatsuya Nakadai is wasted as the villain who's the only plausible challenger to the hero -- a kind of Basil Rathbone to Mifune's Errol Flynn -- a role that otherwise doesn't give Nakadai much to do but glare at the fools he's allied with.
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