Film School: Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars

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Not all remakes are authorized. The legendary Akira Kurosawa was confronted with this one day in 1964, when he sat down to watch the latest film from the not-yet-legendary Sergio Leone, A Fistful of Dollars. What he saw must have given him déjà vu.

A man without a name wanders into a ramshackle town. He learns, from an innkeeper who will become his greatest ally, that two rival gangs control the place. Incessant violence between them is making life unliveable for everyone else.

The stranger, a formidable gunfighter and a canny businessman, senses an opportunity. He will play the two sides off against one another; make them bid for his unparalleled services, and let them destroy each other. His profits will be through the roof—and hey, if it makes life a little easier for his new friend, well then that’s just a bonus. He puts his plan into action, and the local coffin-maker ends up profiting almost as much as he does.

See, this had already all happened in Kurosawa’s film from three years earlier, Yojimbo. Sure, his nameless man was a samurai played by Toshiro Mifune, not Clint Eastwood’s cowboy, and he used a sword, not a gun. But there were just too many similarities, too many beat-for-beat recreations, for it to be a coincidence; as Kurosawa wrote in a letter to Leone, “It is a very fine film, but it is my film.” Kurosawa sued, and a judge agreed, awarding him a handsome financial settlement and the movie’s Asian rights. Leone—who had tried to buy the rights from Kurosawa before shooting began but been turned down—admitted that to not give him a screen credit had been a mistake.

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That Kurosawa’s movie was so easily reimagined in a new cultural context speaks to the shared thematic ground between Westerns and samurai films. Though they are intimately connected to the histories of America and Japan respectively, their shared preoccupation with men and their ever-present potential for violence, honor and the lack thereof, and the moral pollution caused by the promise of wealth, meant that their narratives could be more or less interchangeable. The iconography was different—one was robes and swords, the other horses and guns—but their concerns were often the same.

Leone may have stolen from Kurosawa, but Kurosawa was in turn famously inspired by the granddaddy of all the American Western directors, John Ford. Other American influences are visible throughout his career too. The second half of 1950’s Scandal is a clear riff on Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life (complete with emotional “Auld Lang Syne” singalong!), and he made four films—Stray Dog, Drunken Angel, The Bad Sleep Well and High and Low—that fit quite comfortably into the American tradition of film noir.

Nevertheless, few directors in cinema history have been as widely, and eclectically influential as Kurosawa; his Seven Samurai was made as The Magnificent Seven by John Sturges, and The Hidden Fortress held the bones of Star Wars. His legacy continues even decades after his death—Spike Lee’s next film will be a remake of High and Low. Considering the enduring, multi-pronged impact Kurosawa has had on American cinema, it’s no surprise that influence would be particularly acute on the most stereotypically American of genres.

With their matching movies, Kurosawa and Leone went a long way towards popularizing the next stage of the Western. Exiting the golden era of the 1950s, the west had gotten a whole lot more bloody. Although A Fistful of Dollars isn’t littered with quite as many severed limbs as Yojimbo, it features several almost farcically lengthy massacre sequences. And while they are more honorable than the many, many people that they dispatch, both deigning to save an innocent family from a nightmarish situation, neither of the movies’ heroes are exactly heroic; certainly not in the vein of a John Wayne or a Gary Cooper. When Mifune and Eastwood walk into their respective towns, they aren’t horrified by the relentless brutality that abounds, but amused. Their first thought is not “rescue” but “profit.” Far from delivering any heroic, rousing speeches, these two nameless men can go whole scenes without talking, communicating all they need to with a moody squint or a wry smile.

These would become the archetypal characteristics of the new heroes of the Spaghetti Western, named for the many Italian directors who’d take the action to their shores during the 1960s and ‘70s; Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars is generally considered the most important early example, though it had been around for a couple of years beforehand. Leone only directed seven films in his whole career, but his Dollars trilogy (For a Few Dollars More would follow in 1965 and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in 1966) and 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West would all be among the beloved subgenre’s seminal works.

Italian filmmaking had long been built around the notion of “post-dubbing”—shooting without a soundtrack and getting actors to dub the dialogue later. This was another hallmark of the Spaghetti Western; by erasing the language barrier, it was opened up for the rest of the world, allowing for actors that didn’t speak the same language to appear as if they did, and thus creating many wonderfully eclectic, globe-spanning casts. It also left room for a symbolic passing of the torch between the classic era and this new, more violent one, with old hands at the studio Western like Henry Fonda, Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef blessing this upstart new cinematic movement with their formidable gravitas.

On the directorial side however, as we’ve seen, the inspiration chain went from John Ford to Akira Kurosawa, from Kurosawa to Sergio Leone, and then from Leone to…Quentin Tarantino. “Sergio Leone is my favorite filmmaker. There’s no other director I’ve taken so much from”, Tarantino said in his foreword to Christopher Frayling’s book, Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece, and indeed it takes no effort at all to see the influence of Leone on Tarantino’s expansive, ultra-stylized hyperviolence—Leone’s most famous collaborator, composer Ennio Morricone, even scored Tarantino’s Western The Hateful Eight.

It’s ironic that such a chain would lead from Ford to Tarantino when the latter has been outspoken about how much he hates the former, but it’s also symbolic of how the Western has had to morph and shift—as evidenced by Kurosawa and Leone, even between countries—to survive all the way into the 21st century.

Next week: we delve further into Ford’s complicated legacy, exploring three very different versions of Stagecoach.

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.

Film School: Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars

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