10 Films That Were Secretly Remade

8. Last Man Standing Is Yojimbo

Hollywood bloody loved Akira Kurosawa. Not enough to ever fund any of his films - at least until the eighties, when he was getting on a bit and superfans George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola co-produced his samurai epic Kagemusha - but they were rather fond of pinching his plots, taking all the Japanese people out of it and moving the setting for the Feudal East to the American West. Yojimbo is one of the most oft-pilfered stories in Kurosawa's filmography, and you can see what makes the basic concept so appealing to screenwriters. So much so that even the director himself changed his upcoming production Sanjuro to be more similar to it, slotting in Toshiro Mifune's ronin character for another appearance after his first was so successful. Like Groundhog Day, it's the simple premise of Yojimbo that is so enduring, and so easy to adapt to other settings. Mifune stars as the masterless, wandering samurai towards the end of the Edo Period, who comes upon a town ruled over by two rival criminal gangs. Enjoying a challenge and given offers by each party, he decides to play the two sides off against each other, his manipulations eventually freeing the town of the ne'er-do-well's control in the process. Funnily enough Kurosawa himself got the idea from a Dashiell Hammett novel from the same era and genre of The Big Sleep, but it's Yojimbo that is so often cited in stealth remakes. Such as, for example, Walter Hill's 1996 action film Last Man Standing, starring Bruce Willis. Simply exchange Mifune for Bruce Willis and Edo Period Japan for Prohibition-era Texas, and you've pretty much got this underrated film nailed. It's not got the best critical or commercial reputation, but seeing Bruce updating the classic Man With No Name story to a particularly volatile time in American history is a lot of fun - and whilst many didn't realise the similarities, it is a "credited" remake of Yojimbo. Whether that was actually mentioned in the credits, well...