Yojimbo

Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 classic wasn’t born in a vacuum—the Japanese master openly admitted borrowing from John Ford westerns and Dashiell Hammett pulp fiction to produce his saga of a master-less samurai (Toshiro Mifune) playing rival criminal bosses against one another. Of course, Yojimbo has managed to transcend its influences and make its own impression on everything from spaghetti westerns to modern gangster flicks to anime. Even more so than in The Seven Samurai, Mifune’s undiluted action-hero charisma is refined here.