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,
1:13:02
the cultural atmosphere,
and the originality, is very different.
1:13:06
It's more to do
with Leone and Italian cinema
1:13:09
than with Japanese,
but that was too subtle an argument.
1:13:12
Of course, they should
have cleared the rights.
1:13:15
Some claimed they'd written,
some claimed they didn't.
1:13:19
Some claimed they hadn't got
the money and thought they'd risk it.
1:13:22
Whichever way, Kurosawa did very,
very well out of Fistful of Dollars.
1:13:49
Lots of sadistic laughter. That's what
baddies do in Leone's Westerns.
1:13:53
Again, not something they would
tend to do in the Hollywood equivalent,
1:13:58
where baddies were very colourful.