Spoilers warning
An overwhelming proportion of the comments on Sanjuro in IMDB has been given to its comedy elements. This makes perfect sense because no other Kurosawa/Mifune corroboration has taken this all-out crack at comedy. It does not mean that sense of humour is lacking among Kurosawa's strength. Indeed, no master is truly great without a sense of humour. For example, both Hitchcock and Kurosawa like to inject a dose of their sense of humour, respectively, at the frightening and poignant junctures in their films. In Sanjuro, the amusing characteristics of the character portrayed by Mifune were not new. They were all there in Yojimbo before, but fully unleashed in Sanjuro, and some on the brink of being overused, such as the flexing of the neck and shoulder muscles, which looks like a shrug.
Indeed Kurosawa did not lose a single opportunity of making Sanjuro so much fun to watch. The nine young samurai, courageous but impulsive and inexperienced, provide excellent material and the mood here is set from the very beginning, in the scene when they are trapped in their meeting place. After Mifune (I'm using the artist's name instead of the character's for simplicity) had driven away the enemies and calls them from the hiding place below, their heads pop up in threes, twos and singly, giving it almost an animation flavour. The rescued mother and daughter is of course a pair of darlings, particularly the mother, whose interaction with Mifune is a classic yin and yang confrontation, but depicted in a most amusing way. And then we have the captured samurai who keeps popping out from the closet in which he is confined, offering his unsolicited opinion, then suddenly remembering his station in the scheme of things, crawls back inside, demurely closing the sliding door behind him. These are but a few examples that give the film a festive mood.
The DVD I watched has only Chinese subtitle. Although I can't really claim to judge the quality of the translation as I don't know Japanese, gut feel tells me that they are good compared to the garbage you often see on screens in Hong Kong these days. Still, I can't help but think that for Sanjuro, some of the fun may have been lost in the translation. Fortunately, body language and facial expression does a lot to make up for it.
There is much more in Sanjuro than just first class comedy. Kurosawa is a great master of capturing motion on the screen (as Ozu is the great master in capturing stillness on the screen). The most outstanding scene in Sanjuro demonstrating this occurs quite early in the story. After Mifune voluntarily joins the nine, they formulate the first plan: he would take three men with him to try to rescue the lord's wife and daughter while the rest would scout around for information. This is followed immediately by a series of rapidly cut shots each with a young samurai running swiftly in the street, at various directions. The whole series takes a few seconds but the momentum generated is immense.
While the tone throughout the film is light, we should not lose sight of the undercurrent continually building up between the Kurosawa and Nakadai, culminating in one of the best duel scenes in the entire film industry, if not the best. When the lord's rescued wife first meets Mifune, she comments that he is too `bright', like an unsheathed sword. At the end, Mifune says that both he and Nakadai are unsheathed swords. From the very beginning, these two recognise each other as truly worth opponents and this is reaffirmed during their encounters throughout the film. In the end, Mifune is forced into the duel reluctantly. Even Nakadai himself does not seem to particularly want it. However, within his own universe of logic, because he has been made a fool by Mifune, the only way out for him is a duel. What we have then is a duel very similar to the fast-draw type of duels in westerns, but at close range. And that is what makes a world of difference. The two men stand facing each other, within striking distance, in absolute stillness, for what seems to be an eternity (I was tempted to re-watch the DVD to measure and report the actual time but such a piece of information would take something away the beauty of the film). The absolute intensity is followed by simply brutality as the swords are unsheathed in a flash (but not so fast as to impair our visual enjoyment of the beauty of the geometry of the draws) and the abrupt eruption of blood from Nakadai's chest signifying a punctured heart (the Chinese translation of the title is `Heart piercing sword'). While good direction in a western may match the intensity, I would personally prefer the visual beauty of the silent, deadly draw of the sword to the loud cracking of the gun.
An overwhelming proportion of the comments on Sanjuro in IMDB has been given to its comedy elements. This makes perfect sense because no other Kurosawa/Mifune corroboration has taken this all-out crack at comedy. It does not mean that sense of humour is lacking among Kurosawa's strength. Indeed, no master is truly great without a sense of humour. For example, both Hitchcock and Kurosawa like to inject a dose of their sense of humour, respectively, at the frightening and poignant junctures in their films. In Sanjuro, the amusing characteristics of the character portrayed by Mifune were not new. They were all there in Yojimbo before, but fully unleashed in Sanjuro, and some on the brink of being overused, such as the flexing of the neck and shoulder muscles, which looks like a shrug.
Indeed Kurosawa did not lose a single opportunity of making Sanjuro so much fun to watch. The nine young samurai, courageous but impulsive and inexperienced, provide excellent material and the mood here is set from the very beginning, in the scene when they are trapped in their meeting place. After Mifune (I'm using the artist's name instead of the character's for simplicity) had driven away the enemies and calls them from the hiding place below, their heads pop up in threes, twos and singly, giving it almost an animation flavour. The rescued mother and daughter is of course a pair of darlings, particularly the mother, whose interaction with Mifune is a classic yin and yang confrontation, but depicted in a most amusing way. And then we have the captured samurai who keeps popping out from the closet in which he is confined, offering his unsolicited opinion, then suddenly remembering his station in the scheme of things, crawls back inside, demurely closing the sliding door behind him. These are but a few examples that give the film a festive mood.
The DVD I watched has only Chinese subtitle. Although I can't really claim to judge the quality of the translation as I don't know Japanese, gut feel tells me that they are good compared to the garbage you often see on screens in Hong Kong these days. Still, I can't help but think that for Sanjuro, some of the fun may have been lost in the translation. Fortunately, body language and facial expression does a lot to make up for it.
There is much more in Sanjuro than just first class comedy. Kurosawa is a great master of capturing motion on the screen (as Ozu is the great master in capturing stillness on the screen). The most outstanding scene in Sanjuro demonstrating this occurs quite early in the story. After Mifune voluntarily joins the nine, they formulate the first plan: he would take three men with him to try to rescue the lord's wife and daughter while the rest would scout around for information. This is followed immediately by a series of rapidly cut shots each with a young samurai running swiftly in the street, at various directions. The whole series takes a few seconds but the momentum generated is immense.
While the tone throughout the film is light, we should not lose sight of the undercurrent continually building up between the Kurosawa and Nakadai, culminating in one of the best duel scenes in the entire film industry, if not the best. When the lord's rescued wife first meets Mifune, she comments that he is too `bright', like an unsheathed sword. At the end, Mifune says that both he and Nakadai are unsheathed swords. From the very beginning, these two recognise each other as truly worth opponents and this is reaffirmed during their encounters throughout the film. In the end, Mifune is forced into the duel reluctantly. Even Nakadai himself does not seem to particularly want it. However, within his own universe of logic, because he has been made a fool by Mifune, the only way out for him is a duel. What we have then is a duel very similar to the fast-draw type of duels in westerns, but at close range. And that is what makes a world of difference. The two men stand facing each other, within striking distance, in absolute stillness, for what seems to be an eternity (I was tempted to re-watch the DVD to measure and report the actual time but such a piece of information would take something away the beauty of the film). The absolute intensity is followed by simply brutality as the swords are unsheathed in a flash (but not so fast as to impair our visual enjoyment of the beauty of the geometry of the draws) and the abrupt eruption of blood from Nakadai's chest signifying a punctured heart (the Chinese translation of the title is `Heart piercing sword'). While good direction in a western may match the intensity, I would personally prefer the visual beauty of the silent, deadly draw of the sword to the loud cracking of the gun.