Day 43 : Essay Excerpt : A Fistful of Yojimbo

There are many ways to read the relationship between a film and its remake: in terms of fidelity, imitation, plagiarism, appropriation, or other enactments of power. For the most part, such models rely on a binary system to analyse the relationship between two films in isolation from their surroundings. In this chapter I wish to examine such a relationship in terms of a wider model of understanding, based on possibilities of dialogue with a wider film genre. The case study will be the relationship between Akira Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo (Yojimbo 1961) and Sergio Leone’s remake, A Fistful of Dollars (Per un Pugno di Dollari 1964). The two films themselves are very well known. Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) made Yojimbo because he had always wanted to make a movie in the Western genre after the style of John Ford, whose movies he had seen as a child. Sergio Leone (1929–1989) was electrified by Yojimbo and made his own version starring Clint East wood, a relative unknown. Both films broke box-office records, inspired sequels and made huge stars of their main actors, Toshiro Mifune and Eastwood. As we shall see later in this chapter, Leone’s film has been credited with single-handedly creating a new genre in European cinema, the ‘Spaghetti Western’. Taken individually, these films had a massive impact on the Japanese and Italian film industries respectively. Both have been critically examined in terms of this impact, but, surprisingly, they are hardly ever discussed in relation to each other. When they are, critics focus on the fact that although Leone’s film was extremely close to Kurosawa’s, he failed to credit Kurosawa on the screen titles, giving rise to charges of plagiarism (Galbraith 2001: 311); or, alternately, to analyses that compare the scripts to see how different Leone’s film was from the original (Frayling 1998: 148–150). The main approaches to the films so far have thus taken the form of ‘fidelity discourse’.

Examining the plot, both films tell the story of a nameless hero who arrives in a town being torn apart by the power struggles between two rival gangs. This so-called ‘hero’ decides to amuse himself and cause some trouble, hiring himself out to the highest bidder as a bodyguard. Both films derive humour from the mannerisms of the hero – Mifune’s ronin, or masterless samurai, far from being a noble warrior, spends all his time scratching, cursing and stuffing himself with rice and saké, while Eastwood’s cowboy smokes constantly, falls asleep instantly and hardly speaks for the duration of the film. Both men are only out for money. Both redeem themselves in a side plot, saving a young woman and returning her to her family, but the films escalate into an apocalypse of violence and death, ending with dust and smoke swirling around the empty streets of what is now a ghost town. Leone’s film reprises the same story, characters and even dialogue as Kurosawa’s film. One cannot deny that the two films are very close. However, in this chapter I wish to get away from fidelity discourse and find some way of analysing these two films that will give us a broader understanding of the relationship between them, as well as a better understanding of their combined impact on the Hollywood Western genre.  
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Both Kurosawa and Leone were innovative in their use and depiction of violence, breaking with the conventions of Japanese jidaigeki (historical costume drama) and the Hollywood Western. In terms of camerawork, Kurosawa and Leone employed existing techniques but played upon convention to produce startling results, many of which have since become staples of the Western genre.

For both the domestic and international audience, perhaps the most influential scenes in Yojimbo were the images of violence: the dog trot ting past with a human hand in its mouth; a severed arm lying on the ground; Unosuke, the villain, lying in a pool of his own blood. Before 1961, blood on the Japanese screen had been the preserve of horror movies, not jidaigeki. After Yojimbo, fights which had previously  been choreographed to the last detail now took on the unpredictable and explosive action of Toshiro Mifune. Nishimura argues that Mifune’s instantaneous explosions of violence had so much impact not only because they were so different to the choreography of chambara swordplay movies, but also because the primary effect for the spectator was one of powerful, emotional catharsis (Nishimura 2000: 116). However, Japanese directors were more captivated by the violence itself than its emotional effects. Japanese cinema became even more bloody after the sequel to Yojimbo, Sanjuro (Sanjuro 1962), featured a geyser of blood erupting from the villain’s chest. Such graphic violence influenced jidaigeki to the extent that it degenerated into the zankoku eiga or ‘cruel film’ genre, seen in many Toei  ̄and Toho productions of 1962–1963 (Nishimura 2000: 117–118; Yoshimoto 2000: 290–291). Yojimbo opened in art-house cinemas in the United States in 1962 to mixed reviews. Seneca International picked it up for wider distribution, adding English subtitles and later releasing a dubbed version. The same violence which so influenced Japanese jidaigeki made a great impact on Hollywood directors. However, Hollywood was not shocked by the blood in Yojimbo so much as impressed by Kurosawa’s intelligent hand ling of violence. Arthur Penn later used Kurosawa’s technique of inter spersing slow motion with normal speed by using multicamera filming to achieve the climactic violent ending of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). It may be argued that the impact of Kurosawa’s violence on Hollywood was the exact opposite of its impact on jidaigeki, as American directors were more interested in the emotional effects. Kurosawa’s beautiful and shocking images stay in the mind because they emphasise the horror of the brutality behind them. Leone’s film was also violent for the time, featuring more blood and realistic death throes than would be expected from either the Hollywood or European Western. By the time that audi ences had seen both Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, other directors were also attempting more realistic gunfights, although few were to attempt the scale of Leone’s massacre by the river. While Leone also used the shock of explosive action, his fight scenes were effected differently: the unbearable tension of the drawn-out standoff was to become a Leone staple and classic feature of the Hollywood Western.


~~Essay - A Fistful of Yojimbo: Appropriation and Dialogue in Japanese Cinema -by- Rachael Hutchinson from the book World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood