The Lone Hero

Yojimbo (Yojinbo, The Bodyguard, 1961) raises different issues related to translation than the previous films: Rashomon’s screenplay was based on two Japanese stories and Kurosawa cowrote Seven Samurai as an original screenplay. In short, it could be argued that the stories are firmly Japanese. Yojimbo however has its roots in Dashiell Hammet’s novel, Red Harvest (1992),1 and, perhaps also—as Leone argued during the copyright battle over A Fistful of Dollars—Goldoni’s eighteenth-century play A Servant to Two Masters (1753). It is clearly structured as a Western; that is, as Kurosawa would say, it uses the visual grammar of the Western and certainly recalls High Noon as well as Shane (1953). Its morally ambiguous hero, the bodyguard (Toshiro Mifune), seems to refer more to the world weary, aging Ringo (Gregory Peck) in The Gunfighter (1950) than to the boyish, clean cut Alan Ladd in Shane.