A bandit who has violent sex with a samurai’s wife he accosts in the woods, Tajomaru is a villain, all right. But is he a rapist, a killer? These are the famously unresolved questions in Akira Kurosawa’s pioneering drama, which introduced Japanese film to a wide Western audience after the war. The movie’s title still stands as shorthand for a mystery with no solution. But Mifune’s feral performance, like Brando’s in A Streetcar Named Desire, cued a revision of who was hero and who villain. If the bad guy was vigorous and sexy enough, he could be the hero in the modern audience’s eyes.
