Toshiro Mifune is the original man with no name in Yojimbo, one of Kurosawa’s most thrilling and iconic samurai adventures. In the late Edo period, a swaggering rōnin arrives in town looking for a drink, a meal and a place to sleep but instead finds himself mixed up with two feuding yakuza gangs who have overrun the village. Realising that the town would be better off with both sides gone, the rōnin begins a long con on two fronts, getting on both gangs’ good sides while double crossing them at the same time – naturally this play can only go so far before all swords turn on him.

The film whose grand influential legacy would include Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (which even led to a lawsuit from Toho), Yojimbo is simply one of the finest samurai films there is, not just for Toshiro Mifune’s crafty grump of a swordsman (which won him the Volpi Cup at Venice) but also for its exquisite framing, gleeful humour, awe-inspiring swordplay, and a lingering bleakness – the final showdown is one of cinema’s all timer’s. The film was so successful that Kurosawa even made changes to his next project Sanjuro in order to give the people the more of Mifune’s roaming samurai – one movie is truly not enough time with this guy.