The greatest challenge in writing something about Criterion's Yojimbo and Sanjuro Blu-ray upgrades is that so much has already been said. After a fair amount of combing through the rest of the coverage out there, I think something more should be said in reference to how much work and (more importantly) time that Criterion puts into releases like this one. If you've owned two previous versions of these and see this as an easy, snap-of-the-fingers job, you couldn't be more wrong.
Like The Third Man before them, Yojimbo and Sanjuro have gone through three digital lives and restorations/remasterings: the first edition of each, a remastering pass with new supplements, and a second remastering for 1080p presentation coupled with a glorious debut on Blu-ray. It's not really common knowledge outside the home theater enthusiast set that taking an existing Criterion title that had a "high-definition transfer" to Blu-ray is not quite as simple as pushing a button and spitting out a bigger file. As company president Peter Becker put it to me in March, there's a whole different class of precision to cleaning up the "thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices, warps, jitter, and flicker" mentioned in the fine print of every Criterion booklet.
They're cleaning from the same source (a high-quality digital scan of the best available elements), but there are exponentially more little nasty things to fix when dealing with such an exponentially large canvas. As Mira Nair said when we spoke a few weeks ago, Criterion really is "God's gift to cinema", because with the exception of a very small number of major prestige titles, the studios aren't even trying to make their vintage material look this good. The same amount of care and skill goes into Criterion Blu-ray titles as when The Louvre restores and maintains Mona Lisa.
After taking in the copious amount of work done on both these movies, and tapping my feet to the scores of each, I can confidently recommend them both without reservation (big surprise). The evidence is visible immediately. Throughout both films, the jump from first edition DVD to this one is utterly captivating. So, to those Kurosawa fanatics who wanted the "AK 100" 25-film box set to have been all Blu-rays, please understand why it didn't happen. There was no way in hell it would have been possible to accomplish full HD restorations on all those movies in a single year if Criterion had quadrupled their restoration staff and put off every other project for two years. Were resources and money infinite, we'd all be much happier. As for the reality of things, I'm happy to wait as these trickle out.