I think I read somewhere that Kurosawa had sued Sergio Leone’s company for stealing from Yojimbo to make Fistful of Dollars and Kurosawa had won the lawsuit. Kurosawa said he’d made more from Fistful of Dollars than he’d made from Yojimbo. No surprise that that he won the lawsuit, but a pity that the copy did so much better at the box office than the original.
Once again, I find myself no fan of the pop culture knock-off. The things I like most in FoD come from Yojimbo or the Westerns that precede it, things like the cinematography and the grittiness. You hear that FoD introduced this roughness into the Western genre, but I’m thinking Kurosawa deserves that accolade more than Leone. Kurosawa made the conceptual leap of creating the gritty, action anti-hero; all I see in Leone is following Kurosawa’s direction.
And he really does follow it. FoD lifts whole scenes out of Yojimbo. A man stops at a fountain for a drink in the beginning of both, and the heroes in both pal up with the inn keeper in both to find out about the bands of bad guys in both. Citation is rife, at least in some of the more surface elements.But when I consider the depth and involvement I felt in the two movies, I really see the difference. FoD is more a stylistic exercise than anything else. In the many parallel scenes and actions in the two films, scenes like the rescue of the damsel in distress have genuine resonance in Kurosawa while, in Leone, Joe just goes through the motions. There’s a deep moral motive in Yojimbo, but Joe just does the rescue; Joe’s hair is hardly messed up in his rescue, but Yojimbo can hardly walk or even breath after he is caught. One character clearly reaches deeper and sacrifices more for a human value that does the other. The depth of humanity that you find in Kurosawa is lacking in FoD.
So for me, Fistful of Dollars is more a historical curiosity than a work of art that moves me, that I recognize humanity in. Good for what it is.
