Last Man Standing Danced to Kurosawa’s and Hammett’s Tune One Last Time
Bruce Willis became the last Man With No Name 25 years ago
A dusty town in the middle of nowhere. Two gangs, violent and callous, fighting over nothing that matters. Innocent people who are “weakly caught in the middle,” forced to choose between evils in the battles of bad against bad. And then: A drifter with a past we can only guess at, and a name we’ll never know, who stands in between.
If there’s a modern mythology, cinema’s “Man with No Name” is a part of it, another kind of hero with a thousand faces. Dashiell Hammett’s character, the Continental Op, first played two sides against each other in the novel Red Harvest in 1929. Fans of the samurai and Western genres know the works that followed: Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo translated the story seamlessly into a story of Japan’s Edo period in 1961, and almost immediately afterward, Italian director Sergio Leone set the story in the American West and used it to turn Clint Eastwood into an international sensation in 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars.
Plenty of movies and directors draw from this same well all the time. You can find a protagonist without a name in literally the last thing I wrote about, or, say, Cormac McCarthy and Ridley Scott’s 2013 film The Counselor. You could find a lone samurai go up against outlaws and a grim dude slapping leather against criminals in literally the same weekend in 2004 if you happened to want to see Kill Bill Vol. 2 and The Punisher. Very few films have made the attempt to do another retelling after Leone, though.
Last Man Standing, turning 25 today, is one of them. And while it doesn’t quite stand shoulder to shoulder with its influences, it’s still an endlessly watchable movie, and one that brings the story closer to its noir origins while also featuring Bruce Willis when he still cared and Christopher Walken havin’ a normal one. Both men smirk one-liners and spew tons of hot lead opposite a stacked cast until…well, consider the title.
Last Man Standing doesn’t quite adapt its influences shot for shot, but most of the plot beats and gimmicks are right where you expect them if you’ve watched Leone and Kurosawa. Willis’ nameless drifter comes to the same fork in the road that Toshiro Mifune’s wandering ronin does, but instead of tossing a stick to decide which way he’ll go, Willis spins an empty bottle of booze. When asked for his name, Mifune blithely makes something up (he is inspired by the mulberry field he happens to glimpse out a nearby window). Willis just says he’s “John Smith.”
What’s different about this take is the framing and the genre. There is a lot of it that is Western in feel—dusty streets and gun duels are constant features of the setting—but it’s told in the style of a noir right out of Hammett’s Prohibition-era milieu, complete with hardboiled narration courtesy of Willis. The criminal enterprise at issue is ostensibly bootlegging, but just like in every other iteration of this story, it hardly matters: The town of Jericho is a hole in the ground with maybe two or three citizens who aren’t pistol-packing outlaws. (One of them is the undertaker, who couldn’t be happier at Willis’ arrival.)
The narration would make you think we’d see more of the inside of Willis’ head in a way we didn’t get to with Eastwood or Mifune, but the truth is it doesn’t really make us any more privy to what he’s planning to do and why: Mostly it’s to set the tone. We know “John Smith” chafes against the exploitation and cruelty he witnesses, but not what it is about him that drives him to try to make it right.
