What the classic Spaghetti Westerns
really owe to Akira Kurosawa
By Damian Flanagan*
I was recently rewatching the three spaghetti western
classics, "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More,"
and "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" -- collectively known as
"The Dollars Trilogy" -- films that have long resonated in my imagination.
It's well known that "A Fistful of Dollars"
was an unauthorised reworking of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's highly
regarded 1961 film, "Yojinbo" ("The Bodyguard"). Yet if you
think about what director Sergio Leone took most from Kurosawa in the trilogy,
then it seems less about just copying the character and plot for his opening
film and more about allowing Kurosawa's conceptual ideas to gradually inspire
Leone in uniquely interesting ways.
In "Yojinbo" -- a film about a masterless
samurai playing off two feuding houses of retainers against each other --
Kurosawa was daringly satirising the most important value system of pre-modern
Japan: The code of feudal loyalty, the idea that absolute, unquestioning
obedience to a feudal lord was the greatest samurai virtue.
Confucian ideals about loyalty underpinned the entire
power structure of Edo period (1603-1867) Japan and indeed carried on into the
modern age, transferred in the Meiji era (1868-1912) to submission to the
nation state, and finally in the post-war era to dedication to the Japanese
company.
Yet Kurosawa's anti-hero, memorably played by Toshiro
Mifune, is not a self-sacrificing samurai lifted from the pages of classic
plays like "The 47 Loyal Retainers," but rather a pragmatically
self-interested and self-contained man, completely uninterested in
"loyalty" and casually flipping his services between rival clans as
and when he feels like it.
In "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964), Sergio
Leone stayed mostly faithful to the plot of Kurosawa's original, simply
transposing the action from a Japanese village to a Wild West town and
retaining the claustrophobic atmosphere. It's still a story about an enigmatic
loner switching loyalty from one scheming clan to another, but in the Wild West
-- where vigorous individualism reigned supreme -- the trampling of the concept
of "loyalty" did not carry the same iconoclastic meaning as it did in
Japan.
Yet in subsequent films Leone began to explore how his
modern take on the Western could be used to subvert specifically European value
systems in the same way that Kurosawa had satirised traditional Japanese value
systems.
In "For a Few Dollars More" (1965) -- while
maintaining the same stylized gunfights, cast of degenerate-looking characters,
operatic elements and enigmatic lead character as "A Fistful of
Dollars" -- we have a narrative line which is informed not by Japan but in
reaction to the suffocating Catholic moral order of Leone's own native Italy.
Two competing bounty hunters (played by Clint Eastwood
and Lee Van Cleef) join forces to wipe out an entire band of outlaws. What
really strikes you though is the painterly way in which the director Sergio
Leone frames the assembly of bandits at a derelict church to resemble the
structure of Renaissance religious art works, such as Leonardo da Vinci's famous
portrait of "The Last Supper."
Indio, the bandit leader and his 12 accomplices, are
positioned in the centre of the church like Jesus and his twelve disciples,
sub-divided into groups of three. Indio, a pathological killer, is a kind of
anti-Jesus who assumes the pulpit to speak to his men about the next daring
crime they will commit. Into their midst arrives Eastwood's bounty hunter
character, pretending to be a bandit, though actually a Judas in their midst.
If Kurosawa subverted the prized concept of "loyalty"
at the heart of Japan's moral order, then Leone turned the "moral
authority" of Catholic Europe on its head. Judas, the ultimate villain of
European civilization, is here turned into Leone's angelic hero, while
"Jesus" and his apostles are recast as villains.
Before the bandits rob the bank at El Paso, they enjoy
a "Last Supper" together, breaking bread and gustily drinking wine.
"For a Few Dollars More" narrates a systematic hit job on the central
icons of Christianity, picking off the bandit apostles one by one, until we are
left with only the "anti-Jesus" Indio (played by Gian Maria Volonte),
shot through the heart by the Bible-reading Colonel Mortimer (Van Cleef).
Can you really get away with wiping out
"Jesus" and his whole crew? Won't you meet your comeuppance and hang
from a gibbet like Judas? Entering into the world of "The Good, The Bad
and the Ugly," we discover Blondie (Eastwood) and a new accomplice, Tuco
(Eli Wallach) running a scam that involves outlaw Tuco being repeatedly handed
over for a reward and brought to the point of being hung for crimes, before
having the rope around his neck shot away at the last minute by crack shot
Blondie. As if to taunt the immortal Christian legend of remorse and divine
retribution, these "Judases" (who soon start betraying each other)
keep surviving and tenaciously holding on to life, trying to keep hold of the
bounty they share.
If you were to ask, "What is the central message
of Catholic Europe, embodied in its timeworn artworks?" then it would be
this: Renounce all worldly desires and dreams of gold because the grave gapes
for you. The ephemerality of life, the folly of worldly ambition and the need
to prepare for the afterlife is the key message which suffuses not just all the
religious art of Christendom, but all the secular works, from still lives to
portraiture, too.
In Leone's vision, when at the climax of the film we
reach the seemingly infinite metaphysical graveyard, with identical crosses
panning out in every direction in which the two "Judases" Blondie and
Tuco are encircled, we know we are at the climax. The music soars to new
heights of ecstasy as Tuco, mesmerized and uncontainable, feels dizzy with
excitement at the thought of claiming the gold that is contained within the key
grave.
The entire religiously moral universe has been
overthrown and reconfigured as Ennio Morricone's music -- with its paganistic
yelps, animalistic beats and choral crescendos -- crashes in waves, again and
again. In this arena, gold is not being offered up to enter the grave; rather,
gold is being dug out of the grave to give luxury and meaning to life itself.
Kurosawa's genius is widely acknowledged in film
circles, but Leone's lesser appreciation belittles his achievements. Leone took
as his starting point two vastly different and alien influences, melded them,
reinterpreted them, and then used them as gothic buttresses in a cathedral of
ideas that allows him to reimagine the structure and strictures of western
religion and how it judges fallible mortal men, pitting them against each
other, scrapping over trinkets only to earn holes in their hearts. Leone knows
a thing or two about sin, guilt, redemption and the theatre that plays out at
the graveside: "The Dollars Trilogy" is his masterful altar piece.
Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain.
* https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20211015/p2a/00m/0op/035000c
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