Jim Beaver (JUMBLEJIM@prodigy.net)
Wed, 8 Sep 1999 09:55:39 -0700
>Just curious, has anyone seen Bruce Willis' "Last Man
Standing," and is it
>at all faithful to the source novel, Hammett's "Red
Harvest"? Has a film
>version of that book ever been made which sticks to
the original setting
and
>characters? I love "Fistful of Dollars" and
"Yojimbo," but neither Eastwood
>and Mifune are the Op...
Nor should they be, in my opinion. I don't believe Kurosawa
ever acknowledged a connection between the Hammett piece and
"Yojimbo," and the similarities are superficial and
restricted to situation, as I recall.
"Fistful of Dollars" is, of course, an acknowledged (by the
director) remake of "Yojimbo," but I've never heard anything
to suggest that Leone leaned on Hammett either, except from
fans who were not part of the creation of the film(s). "Last
Man Standing" is a credited remake of "Yojimbo," and it bears
some greater similarity to "Red Harvest" simply in terms of
milieu, but I think the dots are far too separated to connect
Willis, Mifune, or Eastwood to the Continental Op, if indeed
those dots even belong to the same drawing, which I don't
think they do. Happy to be proven wrong, though.
I'm a fan of Walter Hill (the director of LMS), and even
acted in one of his films, but I found the main quality of
LMS that was missing from the earlier versions of Kurosawa's
story was tedium. But I'd have liked to have had the
blank-cartridge concession on LMS.
Jim Beaver
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