10 Best Ever Live Action Movie Duologies

Yojimbo might be more famous for having inspired the first of the Dollars trilogy, thus creating Clint Eastwood's iconic Name with no name character, but its legacy is so much more than that.

The matter of Yojimbo inspiring A Fist Full of Dollars, and both of them, in turn, might have been inspired by Dashiel Hammet's Red Harvest is moot. It is one of the finest films of Akira Kurosawa's filmography. Period. Kurasawa and Torisho Mifune, one of the finest actor-director duo in cinema history, are on top form here and while Eastwood plays the man with no name with his trademark deadpan stoic-ness, Mifune doesn't mind playing up the laughs in this tale of a lone wolf managing to destroy two warring clans from inside out.

At first glance, Sanjuro might not seem like a direct sequel to Yojimbo, but it didn't start as one until Kurosawa decided to turn an unrelated movie he made into the official sequel. Sure, it didn't inspire the slew of imitators and tributes like Yojimbo did but Sanjuro is as entertaining and delightful as its predecessor. Both have Mifune playing a lone samurai who says the name of the nearest flower when asked his name.

The main difference is that in Yojimbo, Mifune goes out of his way looking for trouble, even to the extent of provoking the warring clans. In Sanjuro, he gets involved by sheer accident by saving nine young samurais from their superior who betrayed him. His exasperated reactions at the constant naive idiocies of the idealistic samurais are priceless. All-in-all, Korasawa manages to create a perfect one-two punch in Yojimbo and Sanjuro.