WHY I BECAME A PEIGAN

YUSH!

^^^ was my best atempt at rōmaji

Ah, excellent . . . Yojimbo was like a western, with feuding cattle barons . . . i'll bet Kurosawa intended it to have the look of a western.

Well to be honest, I've seen a lot more "samurai" movies than westerns. Any recommendations? Recently I watched the Good, The Bad and the Ugly and I liked that a lot but that was an Italian made movie.

I love how the actors in Kurosawa's movies appear again and again in different roles and always deliver a convincing character. One of my favorites is Eijiro Tono. He's the inn keeper Gonji in Yojimbo. That dude just rocks!

On a side note if you haven't seen the movie Red Beard, that is a very good movie where Mifune is out of his typical role. He plays a doctor and it is just fantastic.

Tatsuya Nakadai is another actor that just blows me away with his performances.

The list goes on though. There was so much talent coming out of that genre you could talk about it for hours.

The way I heard it, his movies were the seeds of westerns.

Some screen writers/directors/producers may well have been influenced by Kurosawa, and certainly The Magnificent Seven directly translates Seven Samurai into an American idiom and a western locale. However, some of the greatest American westerns were made before Kurosawa began his life's work, and in particular, those of John Ford were powerful and beautifully filmed. The images in Yojimbo reminded me of John Ford. My favorite John Ford western is She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The location shots were done in Monument Valley, and the cinematographer won the Oscar that year. In one scene, the cavalry column is riding up out of monument valley, and a thunderstorm is breaking over one of the mesas. Ford's cinematographer advised that the shot might not come out, and perhaps they should wait (color films were still uncommon, and expensive, then). Ford decided to risk it, and it is one of the most breath-taking scenes in the film. As you can see from the image below, he had a lot to work with.



I can't prove it, but i suspect the Kurosawa was influenced by American westerns, and very likely by John Ford.

I'd think so too, Set.

Here's one of the images from Yojimbo which reminds me of John Ford:

Here, i should have known--Wikipedia has exactly the shot from Yojimbo that i was thinking of. It's got "John Ford Western" written all over it:

Damn, this is making me want to get going again on my NetFlix...

I was just reading Wikipedia on Kurosawa and sure enough in the section regarding his influences:

From Wikipedia


She Wore a Yellow Ribbon seems like a good place to start. Thanks! I'll definitely check that out.

Those screenshots make me want to watch Yojimbo again too. Sanjuro was really good as well and easily stands alone like it was intended. Such rich story and sense of humor, you can't go wrong really.