In his best-known role, Toshiro Mifune plays the boisterous, bullying, thoroughly amoral ronin (masterless samurai) Sanjuro, who wanders into a town terrorized by an ongoing war between two opposing factions, and decides to make a little money--and have a little fun--by cleaning the place up. Hiring himself first to one group, then to the other, he eventually encourages them to kill each other off. Kurosawa's “Japanese Western,” one of the most celebrated of all Japanese films, was inspired by American Westerns, and itself provided the inspiration for later films, including the Italian “spaghetti-Western” genre. Characteristically, Kurosawa's 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)--with brilliantly conceived satiric comedy. Donald Richie writes in The Films of Akira Kurosawa, “Zinnemann (in High Noon) keeps shaking his head over his awful people and (Gary) Cooper's face grows solemn with the importance of his act. Kurosawa...refuses to be portentious about an important matter--social action.... The townspeople...are a gallery of grotesques, a congress of monsters.... Mifune is just as monstrous as any of the monsters.”