One of the finest films ever made, period ...

While Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and The Glass Key were filmed twice under those titles, both in classic and less-than-classic versions (and The Maltese Falcon was even more loosely adapted as the Bette Davis vehicle, Satan Met a Lady), while The Thin Man spawned a series of movie sequels, Hammett's earlier novel, Red Harvest, while never brought to the silver screen under its own name (an ultimately aborted Bernardo Bertolucci attempt in the 80s aside), has ultimately been adapted one way or another more often than any other work in Hammett's small but consistently superb oeuvre. Hammett's tale of a depression-era mercenary playing two sides of a smalltown dispute against each other might be best recognized to filmgoers as Sergio Leone's spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars, and perhaps least loved as Walter Hill's gangster flick, Last Man Standing, with swervings through fantasy (The Warrior and the Sorceress), the Coen Brothers (Miller's Crossing), streetgangs (Fresh) and, most recently, the straight-to-video action market (Coyote Moon)--there's even an Icelandic version--but the best of 'em all is the first of 'em all, Akira Kurosawa's flawless chambara (sword, in a moment of Japanese onomatopoiea) film, Yojimbo.

And with all due respect to Clint Eastwood (much less Bruce Willis, David Carradine and Jean-Claude van Damme), the best take on Hammett's antiheroic (even for the roman noir) Continental Op is Toshiro Mifune's alleged "man with no name" (actually, that's Eastwood, but ...), the have-katana-will-travel ronin, Sanjuro. Mifune is perfect here as not only Kurosawa's deceptively slovenly samurai, but as Hammett's gruff,
long-in-the-tooth (and perhaps-in-the-waistband-as-well) but hardbolied nonetheless mercenary (no doubt the nonexistent French version would have starred Alphaville's Lemmy Caution, Eddie Constantine), displaying all of Hammett's ultimately left-leaning sympathies for the common and oppressed as he plays two feuding warlords in Feudal Japan off each other in order to spare long-suffering villagers their further ravages. The cast, score, and, especially, direction are uniformly excellent, there's a superb sequel, Sanjuro (Mifune vs. the very great Tatsuya Nakadai in what comes off in its lighter moments as a sort of The Apple Blossom Gang Rides Again), and Mifune reprised the role again to good effect several times thereafter (see especially his appearance in the Zatoichi series, sparring with the very great Shintaro Katsu in, of course, Zatoichi vs. Yojimbo). One of the finest films ever made starring one of the coolest actors ever onscreen, period ...