The vocabulary and tropes of Westerns are definitely part of casual public consciousness, especially the subgenre of Spaghetti Westerns. You can say "wah-wah-waaaaah" then whistle to just about anyone and they will picture a quickdraw standoff. Clint Eastwood's Dollars "Trilogy," A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966) are probably the most obvious and influential examples of this kind of film in pop culture.
So, given how much of the genre conventions I'm vaguely aware of, it was weird that I hadn't actually seen any of the classic Westerns that established them. (No, I do not count The White Buffalo.) I decided along with my cinephile friend and recurring character in this blog, James, to cruise through some of the 60's and 70's style Westerns, looking at a couple of genre definers, and some genre subverters.
This first part of my exploration will deal with the genre definers, namely A Fistful of Dollars and the samurai movie it is an unofficial (and unauthorized) remake of, Yojimbo (1961).
In part 2 I'm going to look at two more subversive westerns: High Plains Drifter (1973) and Unforgiven (1992). (I'd seen Unforgiven before, but it was a really long time ago.)
Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars - A (Not all that) Tangled Web
Yojimbo is a black and white Japanese samurai film directed by Akira Kurosawa and written by Kurosawa and Ryūzō Kikushima. It is set around 1860 at the end of Tokugawa Shogunate / Edo period, but I don't know how that's established in the film. I didn't notice any date referenced in the movie, but admittedly any setting, costume, or references to that Japanese historical period would have gone over my head. It's also possible Kurosawa himself revealed that detail.
The plot involves a nameless samurai (played by Toshiro Mifune) who finds himself in a Japanese town that is being torn apart by rival criminal gangs. He plays the two gangs off each other in an attempt to get them both out of town.
A Fistful of Dollars is a Spaghetti Western directed by Sergio Leone and written by Adriano Bolzoni, Mark Lowell, and Víctor Andrés Catena. It was a joint Italian, West German, and Spanish production, filmed in Spain.
The plot involves a nameless gunfighter (played by Clint Eastwood) who finds himself in a Mexican town that is being.... It's the same plot as Yojimbo. It's almost beat for beat identical and the scenes unfold in the same order. All of the major characters in Dollars have equivalents in Yojimbo and even preserve their relation to each other. The strongest faction in Yojimbo is headed by Ushitora assisted by his two brothers; in Dollars it is the Mexican Rojo family headed by Ramon, assisted by his two brothers. The weaker faction in Yojimbo is ostensibly headed by Seibei, but the real power is his wife Orin. In Dollars those roles are played by John Baxter and his wife Consuelo. In both films the protagonist has allies in the tavern keeper Gonji/Silvanito and the town coffin maker. Etc etc.
So, yeah, the remake aspect is pretty obvious. A Fistful of Dollars had its US release delayed for 3 years, with distributers worried Leone would be sued by Kurosawa. Which he was. They settled and Kurosawa got 15% of Dollars's gross.
What I think is really interesting about these two movies is that even though they are so similar, I think Yojimbo is considerably better. And I'm not even talking about cinematography or acting, though I would probably give Yojimbo the edge in the former. I mean that from a story perspective Yojimbo, through subtle differences in framing and context, is a much tighter and more satisfying narrative.
I did enjoy A Fistful of Dollars and I don’t think it’s bad. It is definitely worth seeing and watching it as a companion to Yojimbo is a really fascinating glimpse into adaptation decisions and their consequences.
Adaptation - Framing, Cause and Effect, and Consequence
Note: I'll be referring to the protagonist of Yojimbo as Sanjuro, which is the name, clearly made up on the spot, that he gives to the Sebei gang. I'm going to refer to the protagonist of A Fistful of Dollars as Joe. Joe never introduces himself as that, but the coffin maker starts referring to him that way about halfway through the movie. In the text of the film it's never really clear if that's his actual name. (Taken as part of The Man With No Name Trilogy, it clearly isn't his real name and he's referred to as something else in each of the other two entries, but I don't know if that was the intent all along or something that got injected later.)
Motivation and Character
In these films, the slight alteration to the motivation of the protagonists is probably what makes the biggest difference in the framing of their actions. This combined with a small change in how the warring factions are described by the tavern keeper gives a different cast to Sanjuro compared to Joe.
In Yojimbo, right after Sanjuro arrives in town he has this exchange with Gonji the tavern keeper:
Gonji
This town is doomed. Now do you see? You'll gain nothing by getting sucked into this evil. Eat quickly and leave.
Sanjuro
I've had enough rice. Give me some sake. I like it here. I'll stay awhile.
Gonji
Why? Don't you get it yet?
Sanjuro
Yes, I do. That's why I'm staying. Listen, old man. I'll get paid for killing. And this town is full of men who deserve to die. Think about it. Seibei, Ushitora, the gamblers and drifters with them gone, the town could have a fresh start.
The equivalent scene in A Fistful of Dollars plays out like this:
Silvanito
They've enlisted all the scum that hangs around both sides of the frontier, and they pay in dollars. The Baxters over there. The Rojos there.
Joe
Me right in the middle.
Silvanito
Where you do what?
Joe
Crazy bell ringer was right. There's money to be made in a place like this.
The gang war in Gonji's town is a thing of "evil" and "doom" and Sanjuro, though he's not above profiting, decides to save it. We know why he's involved, why he's playing the gangs against each other, and why he's putting his life in very real danger. It's a rescue mission.
Silvanito doesn't present San Miguel in quite the same way. He does earlier say "The place only has widows" and "Here you can only gain respect by killing other men" which has a similar implication but has much less of the explicit moral doom of Gonji's town.
And Joe's response completely lacks a moral dimension; it's purely mercenary. This makes his actions seem more like the actions of an opportunist who doesn't mind killing people than a wily hero using his cunning to his advantage in a larger fight. Joe does make a purely moral decision of sorts later when he saves Marisol from Ramon and gives her, her husband, and her son the money he's taken from the Rojos. She asks him why, and he responds with "'Cause I knew someone like you once. There was no one there to help. Now, get moving."
It's a good moment, and I very much appreciate that we don't ever find out what he's referring to. But it's so personalized that this doing the right thing for right's sake only applies to saving Marisol and her family, and it really isn't the cause of any of his previous actions. It's clear he did not even know her situation until the prisoner exchange shortly beforehand, a little more than halfway through the film.
From a character perspective Joe is overall is harder to track than Sanjuro is and he is more of an anti-hero. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, not all protagonists have to be good guys and A Fistful of Dollars isn't Yojimbo. But nothing really comes of this difference. Saving Marisol doesn't feel like an inflection point for Joe's character and it isn't crucial to his motivations for the rest of the film. It's just kind of something he does. Dollars retaining the plot element of helping a woman kidnapped by one of the town factions but cutting the line about wanting to save the town makes saving Marisol, and later Silvanito, seem like isolated moments of humanity in a life of violent opportunism. Marisol reminds him of someone, and Silvanito is his friend. Sanjuro wants to free the town, regardless of whether he knows any of them.
It’s interesting that when Dollars was aired on TV 1975, a four minute prologue was added showing Joe, in prison, being offered a pardon if he will go clean out the town of San Miguel. This was shot specifically for this prologue and is obviously not Eastwood: the camera is very deliberately and awkwardly dodging his face and there are only two quick close-up insert shots of Eastwood that are clearly archival footage. So it seems American TV tried to address the anti-hero aspect, the lack of motivation )or both) after the fact. For my money the prologue is weird and awkward and the movie works way better without it.
Toshiro Mifune and Clint Eastwood - Performances
Toshiro Mifune and Clint Eastwood give rather different performances. Both characters are very controlled but Eastwood overall is more opaque.
This was apparently deliberate in the casting. Sergio Leone allegedly said of Eastwood "More than an actor, I needed a mask, and Eastwood, at that time, only had two expressions: with hat and no hat."
I do think that statement, while rather funny, is a little hyperbolic, at least for A Fistful of Dollars. Eastwood’s Joe, while definitely a stoic loner does sometimes have little glimpses of mischief in his eyes, a bit of wryness in some of his line reads, and the way he softens just a touch when explaining to Marisol why he saved her and her family was really well done. These little moments at least leave open the possibility that Joe is being withholding, not blank. He's a mask, not a block of wood. He also could be a very intimidating presence and I absolutely bought that people were frightened of him.
Mifune in general is a bit more expressive than Eastwood and feels less like an archetype. Sanjuro, like Joe, has some moments of dry humor, but he also has authentic moments of worry and anger in a way that Joe doesn't. I thought Mifune's performance in the scene where he finds out about the awfulness of what happened to Nui and her family and lashes out in fury at her husband was really well played. Mifune delivered it with enough ambiguity that it was a little unclear if it was just straight-forward anger at a cowardly man who couldn't protect his family or an outburst to cover up an unexpected paroxysm of sorrow and disgust. Anger to hide a surging emotion he wasn't prepared for.
I think both performances were good and appropriate, though Mifune's was more complex.
Narrative Tightness
Yojimbo is a tighter story with much stronger cause and effect than A Fistful of Dollars. Sanjuro's actions feel less random because we know what he's doing.
A lot of times in A Fistful of Dollars I was thinking "So... what's the plan here?" but not in a way where I was intrigued because I was sure Joe was two steps ahead of me. More like "What was he going to do if this very specific thing he couldn't have accounted for hadn't happened?"
There's several little moments like this, some arising out of the aforementioned obscuration of what Joe's end goal is, but there's one pretty muddled sequence that I think is emblematic of the small retroactive continuity issues in the plotting. This, tellingly, is going to take a little bit of setup to explain.
During a time when the Baxters and Rojos have an unofficial truce due to the proximity of Mexican government officials, Joe sets up a confrontation between the two sides in the town cemetery. Earlier in the film, the Rojos had ambushed and murdered a Mexican Army contingent to steal gold and guns, an event which Joe surreptitiously witnessed. Joe picks up two of the Mexican soldiers' bodies and props them up in the cemetery. He then tells the Baxters that two soldiers survived the massacre and the Baxters should pick them up in the cemetery in order to get leverage over the Rojos. Joe then tells the Rojos that the Baxters are on their way to the cemetery to get the only witnesses to the massacre. This triggers a confrontation at the cemetery, with both sides trying to get to the propped up bodies, seemingly not noticing that neither have moved at all despite all the gunfire.
While this is going on Joe breaks into the Rojos house and searches their distillery in order to find where they hide their money? I guess? During this he is surprised by Marisol who he accidentally knocks out. He then sneaks out with her unconscious body and brings her to Consuelo Baxter.
The two sides return from the cemetery fight, with the Rojos both having “killed” the two witnesses and snagging Antonio Baxter, Consuelo's son. Ramon, realizing Marisol is gone and assuming the Baxters have her, offers Antonio for Marisol. At the prisoner exchange the next day, Joe learns about Marisol's situation.
This whole sequence is very...weird. I'm not sure what Joe was trying to do. Was he just getting the Rojos away so he could rob them? Why did he take Marisol with him? It's not like he knew the Rojos grabbed Antonio during the fight.
There was just a lack of clarity of purpose and this was definitely a situation where Eastwood's stoicism worked against the film. A moment of "Oh, shit!" after he knocked out Marisol would have made his actions seem more like a potentially poorly thought out improvisation.
As it stands the ensuing prisoner swap, which kicks of the endgame of the film, entirely hinges on two complete coincidences: Joe getting surprised by Marisol and Ramon simultaneously grabbing Antonio at the cemetery.
Yojimbo's equivalent scenes had much more narrative economy and much less complexity. The truce is in effect because a Japanese government inspector is in town. Sanjuro finds out from two drunks at the tavern that they were hired by Ushitora to murder a magistrate in a nearby town to get the inspector to leave, as his presence is preventing Ushitora from doing business. Sanjuro turns the murderers over to Sebei, and then tells Ushitora that he heard Sebei has them and is going to take them to the Inspector.
The Ushitoras then deliberately kidnap Sebei and Orin's son Yoichi in order to trade him for the two men who can implicate them. There's a direct cause and effect here: Yoichi is intentionally grabbed as a bargaining chip, not accidentally snagged like Antonio was.
At the exchange, Ushitora’s brother Unosuke then just kills the two men with his pistol (Uno has the only gun in the film) without turning over Yoichi. Sebei, anticipating treachery, reveals that he has Nui, who the Ushitoras were using to keep the mayor, who is “in love” with her, in their pockets. This is the first appearance or reference to Nui in the film. The gangs then trade Nui for Yoichi and then Sanjuro learns her story from Gonji and the rest of the plot kicks into gear when he goes to rescue her, same as in Dollars.
So the end point of these scenes in the two films is the same, but Yojimbo was way more elegant and internally consistent in getting there. The whole sequence in Dollars is dramatic and cool, but if you stop and think about how it unfolded, it kind of falls apart. Sanjuro is deliberately and explicitly trying to get the gangs to break the truce and kill each other, whereas Joe just kind of seems like he’s just f*cking with them. It’s made worse by the convoluted way he non-lethally neutralizes Chico and then the fact that at best, he clearly isn’t sure where the money is in the distillery, or at worst doesn’t know if it’s even there. It doesn’t seem like he has much of a master plan. (Also, why didn’t he just kill Chico, rather than shooting at his feet to make him take cover then shooting an awning out to fall on him and knock him out? Why even risk a witness?)
Plot Wonk - Dollars’s Inheritance from Yojimbo
After watching Yojimbo, some of the things in A Fistful of Dollars mentioned above that I had described to James as “plot wonk” were revealed to be because of the latter’s inheritance from the former, despite the changing of context and framing.
Another instructive example of this is the use of the characters Marisol and her Yojimbo analog, Nui.
Joe saving Marisol is given superficially more weight than Sanjuro saving Nui. Dollars introduces Marisol early and shows her several times, though she doesn't say anything. I think this emphasis on her, not present for Nui in Yojimbo, is why Joe saving Marisol feels like it should be more important to him as a character than it is. This action does get him captured by the Rojos, but I felt some dissonance between the setup for it and it's payoff for Joe. The climactic fight of A Fistful of Dollars doesn't happen because of Marisol; Joe returns to San Miguel to save Silvanito. (And also probably get some vengeance on the Rojos for torturing him.)
Marisol, owing to her early introduction and the amount of time Joe spends intensely staring at her, is framed like more of a main character than she is and, metatexutally, Joe saving the principle female character who otherwise does nothing in the story feels more like an obligation to the movie plot social contract. Marisol is Chekhov's Damsel. She is introduced super early, but doesn't do anything or play any part in the narrative. Joe's motivation to help her is introduced late with regard to how much we've seen her (though we have not actually heard from her).
In Yojimbo, Nui's first appearance is at the prisoner exchange and Sanjuro wasn't aware of her existence before then. She's just one more person in a town he's already decided to save. He doesn't need a moment of humanity to save her from the gangs he was already going to wipe out.
I guess I'm saying that Nui's presence, by being given way less emphasis, is more in harmony with her actual importance to the story. The fact that she can exactly fulfill the same function as Marisol without being introduced in the opening minutes and being periodically shown is telling as to how Marisol, as a character, doesn't really justify her screen time.
I understand the urge to make her more prominent, especially with her actress Marianne Koch being second billed, but the filmmakers didn't really do that. I think she has the same amount of dialog as Nui.
Another thing I think works better in Yojimbo, and reinforces the characterization of the gangs, is how the Ushitoras cannot see Nui as a human. Her utility the Ushitoras is depersonalized compared to Marisol’s to the Rojos. Where Ramon is “in love” with Marisol, Ushitora just wants Nui as a way to manipulate the mayor.
The Ushitoras see Nui as a pawn, a bargaining chip, and nothing more so it makes sense that they don’t believe that Sanjuro would just let her go. He must be hiding her somewhere, this must be part of a play on his part. They can’t even see why someone might free what is essentially a trafficking victim from her captors. So they torture him for information that a normal person would never assume he even has.
This isn’t really a thing in A Fistful of Dollars, where Ramon wants Marisol for personal reasons, but it’s not clear why he even thinks Joe knows where she is. I suppose it could be the same, that Ramon can't imagine someone not taking something they want but I think mostly it’s this way because it is this way in Yojimbo, but without the context shift it is a little random. Nui has a Machiavellian value (theoretically to everyone) in Yojimbo, but Marisol only a personal one (to Ramon) in Dollars.
(Yojimbo is also more explicit about Nui in the dialogue than Dollars is about Marisol. While Yojimbo says “the [mayor] ravishes [Nui] everyday,” Dollars uses the more sanitized language that Ramon “gets the wife to live with him as hostage.”)
A Plague on Both Your Houses - Ushitora and Seibi vs Rojos and Baxters
Yojimbo does a lot more to establish that both of the warring groups are equally awful. Ushitora and Sebei’s factions are both explicitly criminal gangs, and Ushitora is actually a former Sebei lieutenant who split off to make his own play for the town. In A Fistful of Dollars, the setup plays more like just two families in legitimate businesses (guns for Baxters, liquor for Rojos) in a commercial war that has gotten ugly.
Dollars skews heavily toward the Rojos as the greater evil and they get far more screen time than the Baxters. The Baxters are only seen in any detail in an early confrontation with Joe, where four unnamed henchman are assholes to him (and his horse). Beyond that, we don’t see much of them. Silvanito draws some equivalence between the families in dialog, but the viewer only sees the Rojos doing horrific things. When Joe brings Marisol to the Baxters after the cemetery fight, Consuelo is show being sympathetic to her.
And a scene early in Yojimbo, where Sanjuro has been hired by Sebei (I.e. Baxters) but then overhears them treacherously planning to murder him and take their money back has been retained, but shifted to the Rojos.
And as for the four Baxter assholes who tried to run Joe out of town at the beginning by shooting at his horse’s feet, well… Joe murdered them shortly afterwards. It was a fun and tense scene, with Joe saying:
See, I understand you men were just playing around. But the mule, he just doesn't get it. Of course, if you were to all apologize… I don't think it's nice, you laughing. You see, my mule don't like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea you're laughing at him. Now, if you apologize, like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it.
He then quick draws and shoots all four down with near superhuman skill (more on this later). It is satisfying and establishes Joe as an intimidating badass, but in the absence of any further nonsense by the Baxters, it does seem like a disproportionate response. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.
All this framing difference means when the Rojos murder the entire Baxter family because they think they are hiding Joe after he freed Marisol, it feels like the Baxters are bystanders caught up in a Joe / Ramon shitfight, rather than active combatants who played with fire and got burned. There’s no onscreen indication that any of the Baxters “had it coming.”
This makes the moment, present in both films, where the protagonist witnesses the utter massacre from the coffin he’s being snuck out of town in take on a different character. The lack of on-screen villainy from the Baxters throughout, along with the asymmetry of the “fight” due to the setting change (more on this later, too), makes it feel like Joe is probably thinking "Damn i just got all these people killed.” Sanjuro, watching one of the two approximately equivalent gangs wipe out the other, has a more grimly satisfied "One down one to go” cast.
Also, the two groups are more differentiated physically in Dollars, as the Rojos are Mexicans and the Baxters are white Americans. In Yojimbo, the two sides aren’t different families; there’s no racial or national difference and I think that works to the films advantage. They are less distinctive and made of the same stuff as each other physically, historically, and morally. (This also means there’s no brown face in Yojimbo; looking at you Esteban, played by Austrian Sieghardt Rupp).
Yojimbo also contains a great scene early on where the two cowardly gangs, confronting each other in the street don’t have the stomach to fight their own battles. (Sebei’s gang thought Sanjuro was going to lead them, but he walked away after the face off and just watched in amusement.) It very quickly characterizes both the Sebeis and Ushitoras both as bully assholes. This also subtly shows how Unosuke, not present for this aborted fight, might have guessed Sanjuro killed his men at the small house where Nui was imprisoned: other than Unosuke, no one in either gang has much of a penchant for a straight fight.
Swords vs Guns - Differences in Culture and Setting
The change in the film setting, from Edo Japan to Mexico makes for some interesting contrasts.
For me, the suspension of disbelief required is a little higher for A Fistful of Dollars than for Yojimbo. A trained samurai is in a different league than ruffians with knives, and the hand-to-hand nature of the combat makes it easier for me to believe that the gangs believe this one man could turn the tide and that Sanjuro is capable of utterly destroying anyone he comes across.
In A Fistful of Dollars, Joe is almost mythically good at gunfighting, and he has to be otherwise he absolutely would have been killed in that first fight with with the Baxters or in the confrontation with the six men imprisoning Marisol. A samurai with a katana walking away after a swordfight with six men is far easier for me to buy than a man walking away from a gunfight with six men.
This is hardly a dealbreaker and is pretty standard in action movies involving guns, but it stands out when contrasted with Yojimbo.
(Also, the scene in Yojimbo where Sanjuro frees Nui is really badass. Sanjuro, while in front of the small house with Ushitora’s brother Inokichi before anything has happened, “Ino, there's trouble! Everyone is dead! All six men have been killed! Tell Ushitora, quick!” Inokichi runs off back to his brother, and then Sanjuro confidently enters the house and kills all six guards.)
Speaking of guns, Unosuke having the only pistol in Yojimbo, and not being afraid to use it, establishes him as something different, something far more terrible compared to the other Ushitoras and makes him a viable threat to Sanjuro. (Sanjuro still wrecks him in the climax, though, along with everyone else).
The weaponry difference also affects how the final confrontation between the two factions comes across. In Dollars, the Baxters, even the unarmed ones, continually run out of their burning house into a wall of gunfire from the Rojos. This happens over several minutes, so the last Baxters have seen many, many of their friends get fish-in-a-barrelled with no mercy. It went on for long enough that I said to James “Seriously, what did these last guys think was going to happen? It’s like an FPS with crappy AI.” This is more defensible in Yojimbo, as the Ushitoras are hand-to-handing the Sebeis as they run out and there is more of a fight. (This isn’t necessarily a criticism of A Fistful of Dollars, despite my snark. It’s just a difference injected by the setting change, and one that was effective in the moment. It had more the feel of a tragedy, and made the Rojos look like utter monsters.)
I don’t know if this is how it would play to a Japanese audience, but to me, Sanjuro being a samurai implies some things about his character and motives. It’s similar to how if a knight wandered into a medieval European village full of murderers he would be expected because of chivalric code to do something about it. (This is of course referencing literary romantic knights, not historical ones who were often pieces of shit.)
We don’t get this from Joe, whose past is a complete mystery.
Aim for the Heart - The Ending(s)
The climax unfolds a little bit differently between the two films. The setup for both is the same, with an injured Sanjuro/Joe returning to town to save Gonji/Silvanito after he was captured by the Ushitoras/Rojos.
Yojimbo’s climax feels a little more dire in the setup, as when Sanjuro sets out to rescue Gonji he only has a knife. (The gravedigger later gives him a sword.). Joe has his gun and we’ve already seen him wipe out multiple attackers with almost no trouble twice already. I was more concerned about the wounded Sanjuro’s ability to defeat the Ushitoras in hand to hand combat that I was about Joe beating the Rojos in a gunfight. Even more so since Unosuke had a pistol.
A Fistful of Dollars has more tension in the moments just before the fight happens, with Joe showing up with a hidden armored plate under his poncho and a long scene where Ramon repeatedly shoots Joe in the chest with his Winchester rifle, and getting increasingly panicked when Joe somehow keeps getting back up and slowly advancing towards him. Joe says, “You shoot to kill, you better hit the heart. Your own words, Ramon… Aim for the heart or you'll never stop me.”
This is payoff from earlier in the film where the Ramon, shooting at a suit of armor and landing all his shots within a few inches of each other, talks to Joe about how aiming for the heart is the best way to kill a man.
Yojimbo lacks this fight “prologue” and Sanjuro just whips out his sword, after neutralizing Unosuke’s gun arm with a throwing knife, and obliterates everyone with very little trouble. This is similar in ease and duration to the fight in A Fistful of Dollars once Ramon runs out of bullets; Joe ditches the armor plate and just shoots everyone rather. He does give Ramon one last chance to load his rifle and beat him to a draw, but Ramon doesn’t come close to making it. Like I mentioned earlier regarding suspension of disbelief, Joe has to be almost superhuman to beat his odds, but that’s ok. It works and it was satisfying.
Yojimbo inserts a moment of tension in the aftermath when a dying Unosuke asks Sanjuro to hand him the pistol he dropped, as he doesn’t feel like he should die without it in his hand. “Don’t worry,” he says, “I fired it twice, there’s no more bullets.” There’s a pause, and I really wasn’t sure how it was going to go. Is Unosuke telling the truth here? Sanjuro probably legitimately doesn’t know. He does give Unosuke the pistol, but despite Unosuke’s best efforts, he doesn’t have the physical strength left to shoot Sanjuro. They have this exchange before Unosuke dies:
Unosuke
Hey! Two-Bit! Are you there?
Sanjuro
I'm here.
Unosuke
I'll be waiting for you at the gates of hell.
I quite like this, with Sanjuro honoring the requests of a defeated foe, in both returning the gun and answering him even after Unosuke has failed at treachery. The fight’s done. Enemies can still give respect.
A Gallimaufry of Observations
What follows is not strictly adaptation related, but a collection of things I think are interesting in both films. (Mostly Yojimbo, a movie that I would guess is far less well known in the West than A Fistful of Dollars.)
Yojimbo
Yojimbo had more moments that were comic, mostly around Ushitora’s aggressive but dumb younger brother Inokichi. They never felt out of place tonally, though. In particular, the scene where Gonji has to get Inokichi to help carry the coffin where Sanjuro is hiding to the graveyard managed to balance humor and tension masterfully. Gonji slipping Sanjuro a knife inside the coffin with a “Just in case” at the last second, him playing off both Inokichi’s superstition and desire to look brave, and the general conning of a man who is supposed to be looking for Sanjuro into helping him escape under what would be incredibly suspicious circumstances to anyone who wasn’t a fool was all pretty funny yet still felt like a desperate gamble. To quote Sanjuro after Inokichi leaves, “That was all very amusing.”
I think the scene in Yojimbo where Unosuke figures out that Sanjuro must have helped Nui escape was extremely tense and well done. Sanjuro has ice water in his veins, nonchalantly drinking his sake while Unosuke accuses him, despite an incriminating note being right there on the table near Unosuke. If Gonii hadn’t panicked, Sanjuro might have gotten away with it.
Unosuke being the only one with a pistol probably serves as a commentary about changing Japanese values and traditions at the end of the Edo period, modernization, honorable behavior, etc but I’m really not equipped to address any of that. I do like that his pistol makes him the one person that Sanjuro has to be extra vigilant around, like in the aforementioned accusation scene. If it were anyone else, Sanjuro could have just whipped out his sword and fixed it, but Unosuke had a gun in his face.
“Yojimbo” means “Bodyguard” by the way. I think I’m going to start referring to the The Bodyguard (1992) with Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner as Yojimbo (1992).
It’s interesting how much more of Joe getting beaten by the Rojos you see in Dollars, compared to Yojimbo where you drop in after the beating has already happened.
There’s a nice little moment of detail in Yojimbo when during the end massacre, Sebei’s son Yoichi runs to his mothers body and begs rather than drawing sword and making some attempt to fight. His indecision and lack of aggression came up briefly earlier, so it's not out of nowhere.
The score in Yojimbo was kind of surprising. It felt sort of western, with some instruments that maybe were Japanese flutes but overall almost sounding like a big band prototype for later Spaghetti Western scores.
Yojimbo looks really good. There’s some really interestingly composed shots, like the one just before the climax that has Gonji hanging in the foreground and the Ushitoras in the mid-ground facing off against Sanjuro who is standing in the foreground. The scene transitions are generally wipes, which is a little weird now but probably wasn’t at the time.
Kurosawa found some very odd looking people for his movie. Other than Sanjuro, Unosuke, and Nui pretty much everyone was rather distinctive looking. Also, there was one absolute monster on the Ushitora side armed throughout the film with a giant hammer. His character name in the credits is “Kannuki the Giant.” He was played by Tsunagorô Rashômon who is 6’8” and I say “is” because, as of this writing, I think he’s still alive. He’s 104.
A Fistful of Dollars
Per standard Spaghetti Western practice, A Fistful of Dollars was filmed silently and all the audio is dubbed in. Some of the dubbing is good and some not so much, but it’s only slightly distracting and only intermittently at that.
I’m like 90% sure one of the Mexican soldiers actually escaped the Rojos massacre. I think maybe they lost track of him in the edit.
The trailer for Dollars is hilariously bad. In addition to not presenting the plot as all that compelling, it shows nearly the entire climax of the movie.
A Fistful of Dollars has a tagline that I find hilarious: "In his own way he is, perhaps, the most dangerous man alive!" I like how they couldn't commit to him actually being the most dangerous man alive and had to qualify it. Twice. "He is the most dangerous man! But, like, in his own way, you know? I mean, maybe. It's totally possible." I don't have a larger point here.
Conclusion
For my money both of these films are worth watching. I’d say A Fistful of Dollars is good and Yojimbo is great. I’m looking forward to thinking about these films compared to the two more “subversive” Westerns High Plains Drifter (1974) and Unforgiven (1992), both directed by and starring Eastwood.
Thanks for reading.
-m
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