Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
If the similarities in plot between "Red Harvest" and "Yojimbo" are just a coincidence, then they are certainly an extraordinary coincidence. At the very least, both works share an obvious derivation from the themes of classic westerns, right up to the point where the hero, finding no moral barometer outside himself, sells his services to both sides. And it was most certainly not coincidence that the next time the theme popped up in a movie, the movie was a western. Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars," released in 1964, was so obviously taken from "Yojimbo" that some critics noticed almost identical shot selection and camera angles. Certainly the plot was identical; a mysterious stranger, a man with no name, arrives in a town somewhere by the U.S.-Mexican border (though the film was actually shot in Spain). It's a no man's land, caught between two central authorities, the U.S. and Mexican governments, which end up canceling each other out.
It wasn't the first time a western had been made from a Kurosawa film, or even the second. Everyone knows that "The Magnificent Seven" was adapted from Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai"; not as many people know that "Rashomon" was made into a 1964 western, "The Outrage," starring Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey and Claire Bloom. Those films, though, acknowledged their origin and were approved by Kurosawa. "A Fistful of Dollars" was not. Incredibly, Sergio Leone denied the similarities between his and Kurosawa's film. Kurosawa sued in an Italian court; after the case dragged on for a couple of years, he finally settled for a portion of the profits from "A Fistful of Dollars." His copyright was recognized. United Artists, Leone's distributor, retained copyrights on "A Fistful of Dollars."
Let's fast-forward to 1996. Walter Hill directed "Last Man Standing," a gangster film about rival Irish and Italian bootleggers set somewhere on the U.S.'s southwestern border with Mexico -- another no man's land. The stranger, played by Bruce Willis, hires out to both sides well, by now you know the story. The producers of "Last Man Standing" had obtained the rights to remake "Yojimbo" from Kurosawa's estate. In 1996, while working on a story on "Last Man Standing" for the Newark Star-Ledger, a source at New Line Cinema, the film's distributor, told me that it had received a letter from United Artists saying, in effect, "'You are now on legal notice that you have no right to use the plot of 'A Fistful of Dollars.' It was bizarre. Their attitude was like 'Yojimbo' had never been made, let alone made first. We decided to ignore the letter and make our movie."
Even more bizarre, though, was another letter New Line received from Grimaldi Productions -- the same Alberto Grimaldi who had purchased the rights to "Red Harvest." "It was a warning," said my source at New Line, "telling us that we did not have the right to make a film version of 'Red Harvest' without dealing with them. Someone from Grimaldi Productions said to me '"Yojimbo" practically is "Red Harvest" -- it's a samurai version of an American gangster novel.' Many people have said this."
The Grimaldi representative said that to redo "Yojimbo" in a 1920s American gangster setting without acknowledging "Red Harvest" was, according to New Line, "borderline dishonest." But if so, where along the line was the dishonesty first committed? By Kurosawa in not acknowledging the influence of Dashiell Hammett? By Sergio Leone in not acknowledging his debt to Kurosawa? How could anyone charge that "Last Man Standing" was a remake of "A Fistful of Dollars" without also acknowledging that "A Fistful of Dollars" was a remake of "Yojimbo"?
The matter was debated in a flurry of letters, but nothing came of it. When the smoke cleared, "Last Man Standing" was released, and the "Red Harvest" theme had come full circle to its gangster origins.
But not before the "Red Harvest" story had branched off in two more directions. In 1985, "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome," the third of George Miller's Max movies, was released. The first half of the film is a virtual post-apocalyptic remake of "Yojimbo." This time, all central authority has been obliterated in an atomic war. Max, played by Mel Gibson -- the man who would later talk about making "Red Harvest" -- arrives out of the wasteland to find "Bartertown" (Hammett would have loved the name), a crude industrial oasis ruled by two warring factions: Tina Turner's Aunty Entity, who controls the business, and the Master, played by the dwarf Angelo Rossitto, whose workers fuel the engines for Bartertown. Thus capitalism confronts unionism in its crudest form. Miller playfully acknowledges his inspirations. Aunty Entity's thugs are dressed in punk variations of Japanese warrior costumes, and Max, in a big fight scene, is introduced, as Clint Eastwood was in "A Fistful of Dollars," as "the Man With No Name."
A more direct connection to "Red Harvest" was Ethan and Joel Coen's 1990 film, "Miller's Crossing." There were rumors that the Coens had tried and then given up on an attempt to obtain rights to Hammett's first novel; they were certainly known to be Hammett enthusiasts, as their first film, "Blood Simple" (1984), took its title from "Red Harvest." Whatever their intention, the film is a clever splicing of Hammett's "Red Harvest" and "The Glass Key," Hammett's novel of big-city political intrigue, which had been filmed twice, in 1935 starring George Raft and in 1942 with Alan Ladd. Gabriel Byrne's Tom Reagan isn't derived from the Continental Op but from Ed Beaumont, the protagonist of "The Glass Key." Shrewd and amoral, Beaumont manipulates the rival gangs into destroying each other without having to fire a shot. By cross-pollinating the two books, the Coens were able to conceal their sources.
With "Deadwood," the "Red Harvest" theme comes back to its geographical roots, a Northwestern mining town in a no man's land. And so the theme initially inspired by a generation of western pulps and B movies comes back around to its origins. Whether Hammett's hellish vision ever makes it to the big screen, it at least appears that every generation will get the "Red Harvest" it deserves.
