A Fistful of Dollars
Where the DNA of A Fistful of Dollars travels
Films that shaped it
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Ironic, that having borrowed from the Western, Kurosawa inspired one: Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964), with Clint Eastwood, is so similar to "Yojimbo" that homage shades into plagiarism.
Films it shaped
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Nicolas Winding Refn crafted Drive as an intoxicating, neon-drenched fairy tale, but its stoic soul belongs entirely to the French cinematic tradition of the ultra-cool, ascetic criminal. Refn and star Ryan Gosling obsessively studied Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, borrowing Alain Delon's deadpan silence and the mythological code of an underworld phantom who speaks only when absolutely necessary. The film's deliberate, hypnotic pacing and fascination with solitary men navigating fatalistic systems is further reinforced by Melville's Le Cercle Rouge. By bathing the clinical detachment of the French New Wave era in a synth-pop, Los Angeles glow, Refn orchestrated a mesmerizing explosion of romantic brutality.
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Mad Max: Fury Road Atlas note
George Miller screened Kurosawa's Yojimbo for his entire crew before production began on Fury Road, a 1961 Japanese film about a nameless masterless samurai who walks into a town being destroyed by two warring factions and plays them against each other. Max Rockatansky is Yojimbo. The same film became A Fistful of Dollars when Leone remade it. Miller understood that Kurosawa had discovered something about the moral geometry of the lone warrior that survived any genre.
