Yojimbo is most definitely an adaptation of Red Harvest. But
with samurai. Pretty good movie, too. Leans a little more
towards the comedic than Hammett's novel does, but still
effective and fun. The sequel, Sanjuro, which is a reprise of
the character from Yojimbo but has no direct connection to
Hammett, is even more comic and considerably less
successful.
I've never had any problems with the subtitling in any of his
movies.
And I'd certainly vouch for Kurosawa as being hardboiled
"enough." Mostly because he was such an unabashed fan of
American genre films, particular westerns and gangster pics.
Despite being Japanese and all, he really directs like an
American. (For a more trad Japanese film-direction style,
look to Yasujiro Ozu or Kenji Mizoguchi.)
Also, if I recall correctly, inYojimbo there's a scene in
which the main character (Toshiro Mifune) gets clapped around
by some thug that is an almost exact crib from the American
screen adaptation of Hammett's "The Glass Key" in which Alan
gets tossed around by some of the heavy's goons in a back
room. I remember watching it and thinking "Hey, I've seen
this scene before..."
But I think his samurai pictures are piffle in comparison
with his more explicit noirs like "Stray Dog" and "The Bad
Sleep Well". "High and Low" is pretty good too.
"Ran," I think, is a hideous mess perhaps best avoided unless
you've decided that you love his other movies and need to see
them all. In case you don't know, it's his samurai-adaptation
of "King Lear." Much, much more successful in effect is his
B&W adaptation of Macbeth, "Throne of Blood." Love that
title.
David Moran
> I'm not familiar with him. I checked him out
on
> Netflix and they've got several movies by
him.
> Yojimbo looked like the one that I think has
been
> referred to as an adaptation of RED HARVEST.
There
> was another called Ran. Can I get a
decent
> understanding of the movies reading English
subtitles?
>
> Thanks, miker
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # 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 : 06 Jul 2004 EDT