Unlike earlier in his career when the studio forced him to make a sequel to a box office success (“Sanshiro Sugata, Part II”) that he had little interest in, Akira Kurosawa was more than happy to revisit his hero from “Yojimbo” for this entertaining, lighter samurai fare, with Toshiro Mifune’s Sanjuro helping nine inexperienced young samurai tackle corruption in their Tokugawa era clan. There are similarities between the two films, including the use of Tatsuya Nakadai as Mifune’s chief antagonist, this time as a respectable samurai who sides with the corrupt politicians, and Kurosawa’s film-making style, though less audacious, still hinges on the perfect placement of characters within a wide-screen composition, but the tone of this movie is very different from its predecessor, utilizing a more satirical approach to politics and violence as opposed to “Yojimbo’s” anarchic western swept apocalypse, culminating in Mifune and Nakadai’s famous showdown, a climax that features one of the grandest, and hilariously violent, blood geysers in film history.