A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Directed by Sergio Leone
The Man With No Name enters the Mexican village of San Miguel in the midst of a power struggle among the three Rojo brothers and sheriff John Baxter. When a regiment of Mexican soldiers bearing gold intended to pay for new weapons is waylaid by the Rojo brothers, the stranger inserts himself into the middle of the long-simmering battle, selling false information to both sides for his own benefit.
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What critics compared A Fistful of Dollars to
Sergio Leone borrowed the plot for "A Fistful of Dollars," the spaghetti Western that launched Clint Eastwood.
In fact, he adapted the film from "Yojimbo," the Akira Kurosawa samurai-for-hire classic that was remade once before as "A Fistful of Dollars" with Clint Eastwood.
In 1964 Sergio Leone relied on elements from Hammett and Kurosawa for his Spaghetti Western "A Fistful of Dollars."
(The early scene with the truck full of coffins recalls Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars,” in which Clint Eastwood’s character anticipates the violence to come by ordering the mortician to build three pine boxes.)
Furthermore, what about the truckload of coffins spilled out into the road after a vehicular smash-up that Teresa (Bárbara Colen), returning from the city for the matriarch’s funeral, passes on her way home, in an ominous nod to the deadly coffin-and body-producing town in Sergio Leone’s landmark spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars?
The ones that will immediately come to mind are those made by Sergio Leone, such as A Fistful of Dollars , or even some Clint Eastwood-directed Westerns, such as High Plains Drifter (both are films which West has stated are amongst his favorites in the genre).
The new movie takes its title and some of its particulars from Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 spaghetti Western Django, whose success spawned dozens of imitators and was itself inspired by Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
Spaghetti westerns were launched in the 1960s by Italian director Sergio Leone when he took American TV actor Clint Eastwood to Spain to make "A Fistful of Dollars," a western rip off of Akira Kurosawa's samurai film "Yojimbo."
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All those exhausted, lazy comparisons to Tarantino are actually justified by Kick-Ass; it's not just homage, it's reinvention--what A Fistful of Dollars is to Yojimbo, Kick-Ass is to Hard-Boiled.
Back in 1964, Italian maestro Sergio Leone borrowed from Japanese genius Akira Kurosawa, turning Yojimbo into A Fistful of Dollars .
Few films these days are entirely original and there's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other sources - the only person who complained about A Fistful Of Dollars being a rip-off of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo was Akira Kurosawa.
The films end up being crushed by the weight of their own self-importance, filled with empty and soulless homages to The Searchers or A Fistful of Dollars instead of inspiring anything real.
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A remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961), and also a variation on Dashiell Hammet's novel Red Harvest (1929), this is the one in which Eastwood plays two warring cowboy factions against one another, and also the one in which he gets beaten to a bloody pulp.
It's no secret that A Fistful of Dollars is a straight-up copy of Kurosawa's 1961 samurai picture Yojimbo , one that didn't even have the decency to credit the original film - "no secret", hell, it's maybe even the single most famous fact about Leone's film.
He directed Rashomon and Ran, and his Seven Samurai was remade in to The Magnificent Seven, his Yojimbo was remade as A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing.
Though distinctly of a piece with the samurai/ronin narrative tradition, Yojimbo largely takes its cues from the archetypal American western, and in turn inspired two Western remakes, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and Walter Hill's Last Man Standing.
Borrowing heavily from John Ford's westerns, Kurosawa in turn inspires the famous "American" clone that established the "spaghetti western" genre and firmly planted Clint Eastwood as an icon—Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.
One of the most popular of all Kurosawa's movies, Yojimbo has also provided the template for Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and Walter Hills's Last Man Standing.
It’s a story at least as old as Spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)—albeit here it’s given a frightening new urgency in a 21st century context.