I haven’t seen a Japanese movie before, or a film with subtitles throughout the whole movie, so that was hard to get used. At first, I thought the movie was boring, but then as the plot thickened, it got interesting. The samurai is tough and everyone is so scared of him, yet he uses his mind, more than his strength to defeat the evildoers in the town. I also noticed that the fight scene where the samurai is beat up is very similar to The Glass Key, and his escape was also like Ned’s escape.
I found there to be a likeness to Kill Bill as well, and I know that Tarantino took a lot of inspiration from this type of movie. The first thing that I noticed is that the wife’s name is Oren, and that is the name of Lucy Liu’s character in Kill Bill too. Both characters are strong women, who eventually get killed. Also, Oren in Yojimbo runs a brothel, and Liu’s Oren posed as a prostitute to kill an enemey. Oren is the wife of a mob boss in Yojimbo, and Oren is the Japanese mob boss in Kill Bill. Based on these similarities, I think that there is a good chance that Tarantino might have based Liu’s character on Kurasawa’s Oren.
I also found another scene in Yojimbo that I think Tarantino used in Kill Bill. At the end, the samurai scolds the boy whom he encounterd at the beginning of the film, and sends him back to his family instead of killing him. The bride in Kill Bill, has a similar scence when she fights the crazy 88. She spanks a young man, and then lets him go, instead of killing him like she did the rest of her attackers.