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The Bell Curve Meme strikes again, cinema history edition!
I had long known of the Reddit midwit, clickbait anti-American, hipster propaganda factoid that Sergio Leone's seminal A Fistful of Dollars, the film which made Clint Eastwood a star, was nothing but an unlicensed ripoff of Kurosawa's Yojimbo. headlines tell us that Leone "ripped off" Kurosawa, or "Plagiarized" his movie. Notably, Kurosawa would get a 15% stake in Dollars after a lawsuit, and made more money off that 15% than he had off of Yojimbo. I'd long accepted this as a fact: the superior Japanese Samurai film was ripped off by the inferior Western cowboy movie!
But, then I started an audiobook of Dashiell Hammett's 1929 noir Red Harvest, one of his Continental Op books. And what is Red Harvest about? A Mercenary protagonist, middle aged and experienced, nameless, hired or co-opted by crooked criminal warlords in an oppressed town, who plays them off against each other to clean up Personville (Poisonville). It's Yojimbo! Kurosawa acknowledged the influence of another Hammett novel/film adaptation, The Glass Key, in his creation of Yojimbo, but when you read Red Harvest it's obvious that the plot is the same. Dollars might be Yojimbo in the Southwest, but Yojimbo in turn took Red Harvest out of the 1920s Southwest and moved it back in time and across the Pacific.
And it's interesting to me for a few reasons.
The universality of Western culture and globalization of culture earlier and earlier. I've said before that Don Quixote is the proper recipient of the title First Novel, in that it is the first book with a novelistic structure that everything afterward was influenced by, there is no author anywhere after 1945 writing novels who hadn't either read Cervantes or was influenced by people who had; where something like The Tale of Genji can't make a similar claim (though arguably one could make that claim about Genji for authors born after 1985 or so). Kurosawa is iconically Japanese, and iconically among westerners a sort of saint of foreign art film vs Hollywood schlock; but his ideas were often influenced by Western originators. Everything is much more intertwined than people would have you believe.
The way this claim has been used as a bludgeon by a certain kind of cinema hipster, to point to the originality and superiority of Kurosawa over the cowboy movies made in the West. How is that claim impacted by Kurosawa in turn taking Hammett's Noir and turning it into Samurai fare? Hammett in turn was original, in that he drew directly from his work with the Pinkerton's and his involvement in leftist politics for his inspirations. But is anyone really original? Dostoyevsky said that there were only two stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. So at some level nothing is ever going to be original-original, that's not the nature of human culture. Not that I question the Kurosawa-Leone monetary settlement, hey he deserved it for the shot-for-shot remake, that was worth some money. But the cultural credit he receives, and the subsequent scorn heaped on the Westerns, seems excessive.
Just one of those clever factoids that's missing the "fact."
Very similar dialogue occurs regarding Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, though of course The Magnificent Seven was a licensed rip-off of Seven Samurai. If you go even deeper down the rabbit-hole, Seven Samurai was an unlicensed fan-fiction based on High Noon (point of departure - what if Marshal Kane succeeded in getting a posse together), which itself is the plot of A Man for All Seasons put into the American west, and so-on and so-forth until you get back down to the Epic of Gilgamesh which was probably a rip-off of a popular folk tale that probably originated with some people from the next valley over.
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Fistful of Dollars is the weakest entry in the trilogy, and Red Harvest is an overrated novel that I quit reading as soon as I figured out where it was going. I haven't seen Yojimbo, but I have no interest in watching it if it's just another "guy plays two gangs off of one another for personal reasons with a big showdown at the end* film. I mean, seriously, you don't need to be a clairvoyant to see how obvious these plotlines are and how at a certain point you're just waiting for the whole thing to play out.
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Is there any objective evidence that Leone saw Yojimbo before making A Fistful of Dollars, or for that matter that Kurosawa read Red Harvest before making Yojimbo?
On the topic of plagiarism: myself and the missus were recently listening to a Marvin Gaye compilation album, and I mentioned that it infuriates me that the Gaye family's suit against Robin Thicke for ripping off "Got to Give it Up" to make "Blurred Lines" was successful, whereas their suit against Ed Sheeran for ripping off "Let's Get It On" to make "Thinking Out Loud" wasn't. The latter seems a far more blatant rip than the former.
Yes. Leone literally decided to make the film while discussing Yojimbo with a colleague immediately after seeing it. Kurosawa's inspiration is less clear, but he was known to be a fan of noir and Hammett in particular, with Red Harvest being one of Hammett's best and most famous works. It seems unlikely that he missed it.
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I heard the criticism that Kurosawa was himself just copying foreigners and too western, true traditional japanese cinema would be three frames per hour of a tea ceremony.
I mean, Leone is italian. It’s kind of amazing that europeans took a quintessentially american genre and produced a slew of parody-homage-knockoffs that were, for my cheap european money, better than the real thing.
Ultimately, the original inventor does not matter as much as the quality of the end product. It’s the Tarantino Versus Welles dichotomy. Tarantino may just be recycling old B-movies: but they were mediocre, while his are eminently watchable. Orson Welles gets a lot of credit for innovative techniques, but his movies aren’t compelling. I'm sorry, The Third Man is objectively a better movie than Citizen Kane, history of cinema be damned.
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...aren't Kurosawa and Leone basically currently at the same "they made seminal classic movies but let's face it, appreciating them doesn't really make you a cinephile as such by itself" status?
Yeah, pretty much. But there's no peak nor end to cinephilia or any other arena of art-snobbery. I'm sure among cinephiles you'd find those who look down on people who think Tarkovsky's 'Nostalghia' isn't actually self-indulgent artsy trash and a true person of taste and discernment likes some more obscure indeciphrable film with better cinematography.
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I wouldn't be plugged into the cinephile universe enough to tell you, just enough to have heard the factoid and been amused to find out it was, as ever, more nuanced than that.
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