Sprocketed Sources: Badlands

 The Art Gallery of New South Wales has launched a new film season, calling it "Badlands."  These turn out to be films with a 1970s esthetic that an habitué of the Electric Cinema Club or La Rue Champollion would have  recognised. They evoke that period rather than examining the cinema evolution of their "unruly characters, boundary riders and rule breakers." Don't look here for William S. Hart torching Hells Hinges, Friedrich Gnass sassing the St. Pauli cops or Alan Ladd's Raven bringing destruction to The Organisation.

Well, for a city that hasn't had a functioning Cinémathèque this Century, it's still pretty good. It provided a chance to have another look at Akira Kurosawa's 1961 Yôjinbô / Yojimbo - The Bodyguard on a cinema screen with a near capacity audience. 

Once again we kick off seeing unkempt Toshiro Mifune's back, here as he comes to a cross road and, tossing a branch, takes the fork it's fall indicates, continually scratching himself under his coarse robe. Like those predecessors, he's not your clean cut pioneer hero - Erroll Flynn in Dodge City. 

Our so macho lead  finds himself in the village where timber shack inn-keeper Eijirô Tôno stakes him to a plate of rice and fills Mifune in on the feud visible outside his sliding windows. Local merchants Daisuke Katô & Takashi Shimura (that's two out of seven samurai) compete to control the silk fair, having recruited rival mercenaries, including mallet weilding giant Tsunagorô Rashômon. This is where we get the once celebrated (and copied) shot of the dog walking down the street with a man's hand in its mouth.

When he takes down three of the hired goons (glimpse of severed arm still holding a sword) Mifune / Yojimbo becomes a desirable recruit, his price escalating from two to a hundred ryo. “I'll get paid for killing, and this town is full of people who deserve to die.” Soon he's climbing the post to watch the conflict he provoked below and alerts town cooper Atsushi Watanabe  to the fact that his coffin business is about to pick up.  

 Yojimbo - Toshiro Mifune

However Mifune discovers that one boss has carried off the wife of the local his heavies rough up, despite the attempts of their child to see her, and super cool Tatsue Nakadai shows up with the three shot pistol.

Mifune signs on with that lot and then takes down the six henchmen they left watching the woman. When his new boss shows up to survey the chaos (created in a single shot) Toshiro observes that he’d warned that there weren’t enough guards. Saki brewer Shimura's vats catch fire but Nakadai's firepower leaves Mifune bloody and contused to be rescued by the inn keeper and the cooper, hidden in a barrel coffin which they convince one of the bosses to help carry to the cemetery in all the mayhem. Our hero recuperates, impaling fluttering leaves with a kitchen knife (unconvincing effect) to kill time.

This one is really funny and the nice thing is that everyone is in on the joke. Cobweb Castle's Lady MacBeth, Isusu Yamada has a brief comic turn as one leader’s wife. There’s a deliberately super tacky entertainment by the camp follower geishas. The great Masanu Sato score pounds away, but breaks out in Twentieth Century instruments to undercut the drama.

Yojimbo - Kurosawa & Eijirô Tôno

Director Kurosawa's Master Craftsmanship provides unobtrusively complex compositions, characteristically introducing the Elements - wind, rain, dust - even indoors where Mifune stabs the grain storage in the hut ceiling to create an on going shower of rice. It's one of master cameraman Kazuo Miyagawa's least conspicuous outings but his camera finds telling compositions in unremarkable environments.

Yojimbo is, and I'd guess always will be, a model movie entertainment. I'd like to be in the audience watching it in another sixty years. It's quite disturbing when we find participants in this classic samurai adventure turning up in the credits of Godzilla pictures.

With 1964's  Per un pugno di dollari / Fistful of Dollars ripped off from this one and Star Wars from Kakushi-toride no san-akunin / Hidden Fortress, Kurosawa formatted two of the major lines of Twentieth Century cinema. Sergio Corbucci did make his own start on spaghetti westerns and Star Wars is Flash Gordon revived, right down to the tapering roller titles, but it is the point where they adopted the Kurosawa model that these cycles became phenomena.

The copy of Yojimbo screened was an old 35mm. off a second generation negative with its sub-titles printed in. Well, OK but, with these once only chance shows, it would be nice to get best quality. Films like Dragon Inn, The Searchers, The Misfits and The 38th Chamber of Shaolin derive a lot of their impact from best lab work. Don't know about their season's new Australian entry, Echo 8.

Barrie Pattison 2023