HEART OF A WARRIOR
The best actors disappear into their roles; the most transcendent come to embody the archetypes they portray. Thus, John Wayne became inseparable from the image of the granite-jawed, bow-legged, morally righteous cowboy, and Joe Pesci’s bug eyes and tightly wound demeanour inevitably come to mind whenever the spectre of a homicidal mobster is summoned. And the down-on-his-luck samurai, equal parts arrogant and bemused, who wanders into a lawless village and sets matters right? Look no further than Toshiro Mifune.
Look no further, in fact, than the scene in 1961’s , one of the many samurai epics that Mifune made with the towering Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, where Mifune’s man with no name, sword poised in his kamishimo, stares down a bunch of goons on a dusty street before dispatching them in a measured, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger kind of way. The adversaries are all about silent-movie face-pulling and expansive gesturing, in the highly stylised manner of Japan’s ancient
