1:10:02
The early Italian Westerns,
made between 1962 and 1964,
1:10:06
undoubtedly were ersatz American films.
1:10:08
They tried to look like Hollywood,
1:10:10
the main characters
hid under pseudonyms
1:10:13
so Italian audiences
would think they were American films.
1:10:16
They were about Buffalo Bill,
1:10:19
directed by people named
John Fordson, that sort of thing.
1:10:22
Pretending to be Hollywood films.
1:10:24
Cowboy and Indians, liquor,
gunrunners and this sort of thing.
1:10:30
But the whole point
about Fistful of Dollars
1:10:33
is that it's the first really Italian Western.
1:10:36
It's no longer something that
seems a carbon copy American film.
1:10:40
The more you look at it,
the stranger it gets
1:10:42
in comparison with
the Hollywood originals.
1:10:46
I think a lot of the critics missed the point,
seeing an attempt to emulate Hollywood.
1:10:51
These were Italian and Spanish movies,
1:10:53
and the cultural references are, in a way,
the most important thing. The difference.
1:10:58
But of course, yes, they're taking the idea
of the Wild West as a starting point.
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. "