Yojimbo

Yojimbo (用心棒, 1961) is Akira Kurosawa's samurai drama laced with criminal tension, and you can watch online one of the films that founded an entire genre. A masterless ronin drifts into a dusty town, scruffy and sardonic, with little patience for manners and a single sword at his side. Toshiro Mifune plays him, and the role became the stuff of legend.

The town is being torn apart by two gangs of small-time bosses who have turned the streets into a battlefield. The stranger reads the situation in minutes and starts a dangerous game, hiring himself out to one side, then the other, setting them at each other's throats. Among the men he draws into his scheme is a cold gunman played by Tatsuya Nakadai, whose pistol upends the old order of swords. Every move the ronin makes is calculated, and you are never quite sure what he is really after.

Kurosawa directs with dry humor and a flawless eye for composition, and the plot was later remade as the Eastwood western A Fistful of Dollars. From here you can trace the whole lineage of spaghetti westerns and countless lone-warrior action films. Stream Yojimbo (1961) online on iFILM if you want to see where it all began.