Next up on the list of popular movies I haven’t seen, we’ve got this Kurosawa film.

So it’s a samurai movie, of course, and enormously influential on a bunch of fighty-shooty movies that came after. And so I realize that saying “it feels just like a bunch of generic action movies” is getting the arrow of causality partly wrong — it feels like those movies, because at least some of those movies are building on the template Kurosawa established — but still and all, that is basically what it feels like. (And also, this isn’t that early of a movie; it’s from 1961, and Kurosawa was deliberately looking to John Ford and other westerns as an influence, so not all the tropes are originating here.)

As the familiar story begins, a nameless ronin comes into a town where two rival gang factions are fighting it out for control. Because he’s basically a superhero, he could single-handedly propel either side to victory, but he’d rather just sorta fuck around and watch them destroy each other — it sorta seems like he’s doing this to try to get extra money out of it, but also just partly for kicks — until an innocent family gets caught up in it, and his buried conscience leads him to free them from captivity.

This act of conscience, of course, leads to him getting captured and beaten, and then the climax of the movie is his escape and revenge, as basically everyone involved ends up dead one way or another, and the nameless hero rides off into the sunset — well, walks off toward the horizon, anyway.

The movie has a mordant nihilistic edge, not only in the way that all the characters are terrible, not only in the way that the protagonist is mostly amoral, but also in the way that it subverts the samurai swordfight genre by giving the most notable antagonist a pistol that he shoots with gleeful priapic abandon, killing people just to prove to himself that he’s a badass. (But not as much of a badass, it will turn out, as our nameless hero.)

If sardonic violence between terrible people is a thing you like — and a glance at the cinematic landscape, including the American remake of this as A Fistful of Dollars, is pretty emphatic that it’s a popular subject — well, this is a great rendition of that. It’s about as close to a crowd-pleaser as a black-and-white Japanese-language movie can be. But it’s not really my thing, so I’ll chalk this one up as interesting historical perspective, and continue to think that Rashomon is enormously better.