(Japan, 1962, 96 minutes, b/w)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

With Sanjuro, and its earlier companion piece Yojimbo (1961), influential director Akira Kurosawa invented a certain breed of cynical, untrustworthy hero who would live on in numberless action films throughout the world.

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A jaded, lazy older warrior, played by movie legend Toshiro Mifune, agrees to mentor a group of inexperienced samurai in their battles with corrupt clan leaders.

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Vili Maunula, posting on the akirakurosawa.info fan site, wrote "While Yojimbo had been funny, it was also dark, gritty and at times grotesque. Sanjuro, in comparison, is much lighter, brighter, relaxed and openly humorous. It is also a more direct samurai film, with less influence from the likes of John Ford and Dashiell Hammett. Sanjuro is in fact perfectly summed up by Stuart Galbraith IV, who in his Kurosawa-Mifune biography writes that it “is a lightweight film, but as lightweight films go, it is something of a masterpiece.”

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Sanjuro holds a 100 rating on RottenTomatoes.com and in his 1963 New York Times review, Bosley Crowther wrote, "[Kurosawa] has given us in Sanjuro a surprising, fetching, beautifully made film that fitly propounds the lesson of his own professionalism 'Never send a boy to do a man's work.'"

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