Sanjuro

In Tokugawa-era Japan, nine young samurai set out to root out corruption within their clan. They are taken in by a well-dressed official named Kikui, unaware that he is one of the men they should distrust. A scruffy, unkempt ronin sleeping nearby overhears their plans and steps in, saving them from their own mistake. The shabby stranger — Sanjuro Tsubaki — then guides the inexperienced group as they try to rescue an abducted chamberlain and his family and expose the conspirators behind the plot, among them the capable swordsman Hanbei Muroto. The young warriors' lofty notions of what a samurai ought to be are steadily overturned by the methods of the man leading them.

Akira Kurosawa directed Sanjuro, the fifteenth of the twenty-three films he made, arriving between Yojimbo in 1961 and High and Low in 1963. He wrote the screenplay with Hideo Oguni and Ryūzō Kikushima, and Tomoyuki Tanaka and Kikushima produced it for TOHO. The film was conceived as a follow-up to the earlier success, with Toshirō Mifune returning as the wandering swordsman and Tatsuya Nakadai playing his opposite number. Keiju Kobayashi, Yūzō Kayama, Reiko Dan and Takashi Shimura appear among a credited cast of twenty-one. Running 96 minutes, it mixes action with comedy and drama.

Critical reception was strong, with a critics' rating of 8.5/10 from 25 reviews, slightly above the audience scores of 8/10 on IMDb from over forty thousand votes and 7.9/10 on TMDB.