1:11:03
It was clever of Leone to see that Yojimbo
by Kurosawa would make a Western.
1:11:09
He went to see the film in autumn
of 1963 at the Harlequin cinema in Rome,
1:11:14
and asked his friends to go see it,
1:11:17
and then adapted Yojimbo into a Western,
1:11:20
just as John Sturges adapted The Seven
Samurai into The Magnificent Seven.
1:11:25
It was a clever idea to nourish
the Western, not doing too well,
1:11:28
with ideas from a different culture, Japan.
1:11:31
Kurosawa himself admitted
when he made his samurai movies,
1:11:35
it was a homage to the Western.
So the whole thing went full circle.
1:11:39
The trouble was that
nobody had cleared the rights,
1:11:42
and during the shooting of
Fistful of Dollars, word came round:
1:11:45
"Nobody mentioned Yojimbo, all right?
Nobody mentioned Yojimbo. "
1:11:50
Lawyers exchanged letters,
Kurosawa wrote to Leone
1:11:53
when he saw Fistful of Dollars:
1:11:55
"I like your film very much.
It's a very interesting film."
1:11:59
"Unfortunately, it's my film, not yours."
1:12:01
Leone couldn't understand
how rude this was, plagiarism.
1:12:05
He showed this letter to everyone.
"Kurosawa says it's great."
1:12:08
And they said, "But he's saying, 'It's not
your movie. It's based on my movie."'
1:12:12
They eventually settled out of court.
Papi and Colombo, the producers,
1:12:17
their defence was that the plot had
been taken from an Italian original,
1:12:21
an 18th-century play by Carlo Goldoni,
The Servant of Two Masters,
1:12:25
Arlecchino or The Servant of Two
Masters, which was partly true,
1:12:29
but unfortunately it didn't stick,
so Kurosawa, in Japan,
1:12:35
was awarded all the Far-Eastern rights.
1:12:37
Japan, Formosa,
now Taiwan, and South Korea,
1:12:41
plus a percentage of the gross,
1:12:43
and in fact the takings from
Fistful of Dollars which Kurosawa made
1:12:47
was more than any movie that
Kurosawa had ever made himself.
1:12:51
So in the end he did quite well out of it.
1:12:55
It's interesting, you could
mount a more subtle argument.
1:12:58
Yes, the plot is very similar
to Yojimbo, but all the detail,