Sergio Leone’s favourite Akira Kurosawa movie
To be called Quentin Tarantino’s favourite filmmaker is quite a feat, but that’s exactly what Sergio Leone is. The Italian director is a true titan of cinema, credited as the progenitor of the spaghetti western genre, popularising the use of extreme close-ups and expansive long shots throughout his many movies.
Leone’s work in the western category is a genuine marvel, and his Dollar Trilogy as we as Once Upon a Time in the West and Duck, You Sucker! remain absolute classics. Leone had also worked in the crime film genre too, and delivered one of its great works in 1984 with Once Upon a Time in America, starring Robert De Niro and James Woods.
However, it’s unlikely that Leone’s movies would possess anywhere near their actual brilliance without the previous cinematic works of the legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. After all, Leone was personally indebted to Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai film Yojimbo, starring his frequent collaborator Toshiro Mifune.
There are several figures in the film world that believe that Leone’s 1964 spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars – the first movie in the Dollars Trilogy – is a remake of Kurosawa’s classic. However, if it is indeed a remake, it’s not official, as there was a bit of contention between the two directors as to whether the Italian film icon had ripped off his Japanese counterpart.
Yojimbo tells of a masterless samurai arriving in a small Japanese town where two crime lords are vying for its control. They both try to hire the ronin as their bodyguard. A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood, focuses on ‘The Man with No Name’, who turns up in a small Mexico-US border town where two smuggling families are competing to control it, and the stranger decides to play them off against one another. It’s rather obvious that Leone was indebted to Kurosawa’s movie when making his own.
Interestingly, Leone’s wife, Carla, once admitted to her husband’s wish to remake Yojimbo. She said: “I remember going to see Yojimbo with [Leone], and he got the idea of turning it into a Western there and then.” Meanwhile, fellow Italian filmmaker Sergio Corbucci also remembered Leone “slaving over a moviola machine and copying Yojimbo, changing only the setting and details of the dialogue”.
Kurosawa, of course, caught wind of the fact that Leone had copied his film (or unofficially remade it, depending on your perspective) and after he watched A Fistful of Dollars, he wrote a letter to Leone that read, “Signor Leone, I have just had the chance to see your film. It is a very fine film, but it is my film.”
However one perceives the debate between Leone and Kurosawa and their respective films, it’s clear that Leone was a big fan of Yojimbo and held it close to his heart on the set of A Fistful of Dollars. Check out the trailer below.
