Toshiro Mifune looms large in the frame, as big as a mountain, as Masaru Sato’s booming soundtrack announces the star entrance of one of Japan’s greatest film icons, the wandering ronin Sanjuro, who for two of Akira Kurosawa’s most entertaining jidai-geki will outwit and outmaneuver his opponents with a fox’s eye for improvisation and survival. Here, in perhaps the biggest hit of Kurosawa and Mifune’s glorious collaborations, Mifune’s Sanjuro walks into a dusty ghost town Main Street, finds a town divided by two rival Yakuza factions who have aligned themselves respectively with a silk merchant and sake dealer, crippled the economic structure of the town, and littered the street with dead bodies, and finds a way to use his powers as a master warrior bidding for a bodyguard job to play off each gang’s hatred for the other. Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa fill the wide-screen frame with perfect symmetry as Sanjuro watches each gang, coming in from frame left and right, with giddy delight from a watchtower to see what his handy work has wrought, two scared and inexperienced gangs fighting for territory and capitalist control in a post Edo economy filled with corruption, but when Sanjuro isn’t in total control of the situation, we’re more apt to see the action through slats and boards, windows and frames within frames, the director as washed up figurehead. The film is a comedy, but a savage one at that, where the western stylistics of a dusty ghost town in economic free fall, and the wily hucksterism of a hungry ex-warrior, as well as his gun-totting rival (Tatsuya Nakadai) suggest with great ironic symbolism, the problematic politics of Japan’s economic post-war “miracle”, as modeled, of course, on western modernization.