Oh yeah, speaking of Men With No Name, Yojimbo also served as the basic blueprint for the first Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti westerns. We say basic; A Fistful Of Dollars is even closer to Yojimbo than even Last Man Standing, or eighties sci-fi film The Warrior And The Sorceress, or that one episode of Samurai Jack. Rather disingenuously, the film was marketed with the tagline "This is the first film of its kind. It won't be the last," despite everyone who'd seen Yojimbo realising that the movie was effectively an unofficial and unlicensed remake of it. Kurosawa was one of those savvy folks, commenting that Leone had made "a fine movie, but it was MY movie" and consequently suing the Italian director. Leone ignored the said lawsuit, eventually being forced into settling out of court, reportedly for 15% of the worldwide receipts of A Fistful of Dollars and over $100,000. Yeesh. To be fair, the similarities are pretty hard to ignore: this time around, the wandering samurai is instead Clint Eastwood's wandering gunman in the American West, caught in a battle between gangs in a desert town, and even redoes the scene were Mifune defeats a man with a gun using only a knife and a sword with Eastwood survives being shot by a rifle by hiding an iron plate under his clothes. It's pretty shameless, which is probably why Leone found himself several thousand dollars out of pocket. The director attempted to defend himself by citing the same Dashiell Hammett stories and Carlo Goldoni's eighteenth-century play Servant of Two Masters as alternate sources of inspiration but, c'mon, man. You ain't fooling nobody. The similarities between Yojimbo and A Fistful Of Dollars are so bleeding obvious that we can't believe he ever tried to convince people otherwise, and we're actually kind of impressed that he thought he could essentially remake the film in secret. Cheeky so-and-so.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
