RARA-AVIS: RE: A question

From: Dick Lochte ( dlock@ix.netcom.com)
Date: 12 Nov 2000


>
> I just watched an interesting movie on Belgium/Dutch television starring
> Bruce Willis ... But I missed the first of the movie and didn't catch the
title.
> Does anybody know?
>
> Richard Moore

I was expecting somebody to mention the Hammett connection to LAST MAN STANDING. Though Kurosawa claimed he hadn't ripped off Hammett in making YOJIMBO, the plot definitely resembles RED HARVEST. Then Sergio Leone
"adapted" YOJIMBO into the Clint Eastwood western FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. Walt Hill, in LAST MAN, did an American, 1930s version of YOJIMBO, more or less restoring the story to its Hammett origins. The movie is okay, IMO, but it's like that party game where you begin with a simple statement, whisper it to the person next to you and they whisper it on down the line. At the end, you get something only vaguely resembling the original. In this case, lots of shoot-outs and hardboiled posing and, every now and then, an interesting scene, usually involving Christopher Walken.

Dick Lochte

--
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 12 Nov 2000 EST