Kurosawa's beard-stroking badass, Sanjuro, (whose name may be completely made up by the character himself) has all the mannerisms of a samurai version of Clint Eastwood's Man-With-No-Name. Which is perfectly suitable considering the Eastwood character was a blatant reincarnation of Kurosawa's quick-witted ronin anyway. Yojimbo was, at essence, For a Few Dollars More before it even existed and a Samurai Spaghetti Western 42 years before Kill Bill splattered the big screen with its presence and 2 years before its director Quentin Tarantino was born.
Now, this doesn't necessarily make the film any more valuable or original, but it was a cool amalgamation of genres (again, if that word even means anything) that had been done few times before.
Now that we have that silly significance out of the way, I'd like to say that this film is absolutely perfect for the time period and location it was made in. The violent, manipulative, vigilante Sanjuro's actions are guided by a strong moral compass and the pointless feud between the town's two crime bosses that constantly puts everyone in danger serves as a fantastic allegory for the Cold War regardless of whether it was intentional or not (I'm almost certain it was).
Sanjuro himself is introduced as a Ronin rambling about the Japanese countryside, trying to survive on whatever food he can get while still trying to maintain his honor and help his fellow man. The aura of aimlessness that he gives off in the opening moments of the film, walking around scratching the back of his neck, stopping to toss a stick he finds into the air, is only extinguished when he stumbles across a world full of problems to fix. Call it a stretch, but much of the Japanese population may have felt this way after the tragedies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sanjuro, though an unemployed samurai living in the middle of the 19th century is a hero of the maddening, Existential world of the Cold War and Post-WWII Japan. In one particularly-memorable sequence early on in the film, Sanjuro sits laughing in the center of town atop a perch of wisdom (it's actually a belltower or something), watching the two rival clans reluctantly move towards each other in would-be-Mutually-Assured-Destruction.
The film is violent, deep, compelling, comic, and these days nostalgic, all at once. A classic samurai flick that changed the way American Westerns were filmed. Essential viewing for any film buff and, well, pretty much everyone else.
