Yojimbo is a 1961 Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa and starring Toshiro Mifune as a wandering, unaffiliated samurai who plays two rival criminal factions in a small town against each other. The film established an influential template for the lone, morally ambiguous outsider who manipulates opposing sides from a position outside either, a structure later adapted directly, without formal authorization, by Sergio Leone for the 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars, prompting a lawsuit. Mifune won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for the role, and Yojimbo's narrative structure continued to influence later films across genres, including Westerns and other stories built around a solitary, self-interested protagonist.
Facts
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What happened when Sergio Leone remade Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars?
Kurosawa and his producers successfully sued Leone and received royalties and international distribution rights to A Fistful of Dollars.
Leone based his 1964 western A Fistful of Dollars, the first film of his dollars trilogy, on Yojimbo, and it mirrored Kurosawa's film so closely that Kurosawa and his producers sued Leone. They won: they received royalties from the film and the international distribution rights to it.
What inspired Yojimbo?
Dashiell Hammett's detective novels and the lone-hero westerns of John Ford.
Yojimbo drew on two American sources. It was inspired by Dashiell Hammett's detective novels, including Red Harvest from 1929 and The Glass Key from 1931, and it was patterned after American westerns, especially the lone-hero films of John Ford.
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Source Yojimbo (Wikipedia)
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1. Wikidata: Yojimbo
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationYojimbo, Description, original languageQuote, Yojimbo, Description, original language
Yojimbo is a 1961 Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa and starring Toshiro Mifune as a wandering, unaffiliated samurai who plays two rival criminal factions in a small town against each other.
Yojimbo (Wikipedia)
Lead section
Bodyguard) is a 1961 Japanese jidaigeki film directed by Akira Kurosawa, who also co-wrote the screenplay and was one of the producers.
In Medium: Film, Article lead sentence
Yojimbo (Japanese: 用心棒, Hepburn: Yōjinbō; lit. Bodyguard) is a 1961 Japanese jidaigeki film directed by Akira Kurosawa, who also co-wrote the screenplay and was one of the producers. The film stars Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yoko
Created By: Akira Kurosawa, Article lead sentence
Yojimbo (Japanese: 用心棒, Hepburn: Yōjinbō; lit. Bodyguard) is a 1961 Japanese jidaigeki film directed by Akira Kurosawa, who also co-wrote the screenplay and was one of the producers. The film stars Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yoko
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