I'm currently reading the new edition of The Samurai Film by
Alain Silver (who has also written and/or edited numerous
books on film noir). Here's what he says about the above
question:
It has been asserted, initially by David Desser and freqently
since the release of Last Man Standing in 1996, that Yojimbo
is an uncredited adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's1928 novel
Red Harvest. The fact that Walter Hill was one of several
directors to attempt an adaptation of the Hammett novel long
before acquiring the rights to remake Yojimbo has muddied the
waters. While there is a narrative resemblance between the
Kurosawa and Hammett works in that a main character plays two
corrupt factions against each other, there is not much else
to connect them. Plot points cross-over from fiction and
between films and one writer/director may inspire another --
for example the plot point of a police detective who loses
his gun drives both Kurosawa's Stray Dog and Walter Hill's 48
Hours, butbthat hardly makes one an uncredited adaptation of
the other.
Mark
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