In his best known role, Toshiro Mifune plays the boisterous, bullying, amoral ronin (masterless samurai) who calls himself simply “Sanjuro” (“Thirty Years Old”). When Sanjuro wanders into a town terrorized by an ongoing war between two opposing factions, he decides to make a fistful of ryo--and have a little fun--by cleaning the place up. Hiring himself first to one group, then the other, he eventually encourages them to kill each other off. Though it alludes to Japan's own “gold rush” in the passing from feudal to capitalist society (“everybody's after easy money,” laments one character), Yojimbo was inspired by the American western. This Kurosawa venture into the genre combines its best elements--a remarkable authenticity; finely drawn characters, down to the most minor ones; superb editing, and exquisite widescreen cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa. As he had done in Seven Samurai, Kurosawa here makes extensive and surprising use of telephoto lenses, so that the most violent swordfights take on a rare intimacy, and the heroic/anti-heroic figure of Sanjuro, that scratching ronin with almost magical skills, seems to expand absurdly to epic proportions.