Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was a western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo from 1961. When the Italian director first saw Kurosawa’s tale of a rōnin (Toshiro Mifune) arriving in a small Japanese town where two rival gangs fight for supremacy sometime back in 1963, he was so impressed he thought it would translate into a good cowboy film. Unfortunately, Leone failed to secure the movie’s remake rights which led to his company being sued by Toho Productions. This delayed the American release of A Fistful of Dollars for three years. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum
 

 
But Yojimbo was not a truly original story, either. Kurosawa later admitted his movie had been loosely based on the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s crime novel The Glass Key from 1942. More recently, some film writers have pointed out Yojimbo bears an even greater similarity to another of Hammett’s books The Red Harvest—the story of his anonymous Continental Op. working in a town controlled by one kingpin who is battling many other smaller gangs.

Leone used many of Kurosawa’s plot devices in A Fistful of Dollars, with an unnamed anti hero (Clint Eastwood) arriving in a small desert town where two rival gangs fight for its control.

In Kurosawa’s film the town is split between two corrupt families vying for control—three brothers versus a husband and wife. Kurosawa also has other characters and background stories with the gangs hiring loutish mercenaries to do their bidding.

In A Fistful of Dollars the gangs are identified as two families—the Baxters who deal in guns and the Rojos who smuggle liquor. Apart form these two groups, the town appears to be almost deserted with few people other than an undertaker and a barman.

Kurosawa offered a comedy on social manners and the hierarchy of class in Yojimbo. This is not present in A Fistful of Dollars. Leone turned everything up to eleven making the film operatic in its style yet at the same time incredibly austere.

In Yojimbo the lead villain has a pistol. In A Fistful of Dollars he has a Winchester rifle—used to kill any enemies with a bullet to the heart. This leads to a key scene at the film’s denouement.
 

 
The similarities between Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars are not just confined to plot. Leone directly lifted certain scenes visually from Kurosawa’s movie. These can be seen in a supercut created and edited by Alejandro Villarreal@Alamo City. This supercut compares and contrasts key scenes from the two movies giving “a side-by-side look at the respective births of the ‘super-samurai’ action movie genre and the spaghetti western genre.”
 

 
GIFs via Giphy.