Ah, I have nothing very smart, witty, or intellectual to say in this post. Its possible what I say will not even anything remotely relevant to our study of Yojimbo, but I just figured out how to embed videos into my blog, and I’m eager to use my new talent (not that its difficult to do, but I’m still excited about it).
I found this nice little clip from the end of the film and thought I’d share it, mostly because I like it. One of the things I think is interesting about it is the way the smoke obscures our “hero” as he walks towards his enemies. I think this is representative of how little we know of him as well as how he is able to obscure his true motives after arriving in the town.
This brings me to a thought I had earlier today about this movies relation to The Glass Key. At first, I wondered what the relation between the book and this film could possibly be. After doing some online research, I discovered that this film might be a much closer adaptation of another of Hammett’s novels, Red Harvest. The plot, which involved a detective who watches a town slowly destroy itself, seems to fit this film much better, but I still think there are some similarities to The Glass Key. The film seems to draw out the secrecy of Ned Beaumont; just as we never know Ned, we never really know the bodyguard. We discussed in class how we could never really know what Ned was thinking or what his motivations were, and we see that much more with the bodyguard than we did with Ed. Yojimbo also highlights Ned’s more negative characteristics, while those were only touched on with Ed during his visit to the Matthews’. Yojimbo also tries to give the viewer a fuller picture of Ned/Ed/the bodyguard by portraying him as a flawed character, but one who tries to redeem himself by doing good. I suppose The Glass Key attempts to do this as well with the Janet storyline, but I think Yojimbo accomplishes this much more effectively.