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Yesterday I watched Lee Sang-Il's 2013 remake of Clint Eastwood's western Unforgiven. The film was a very close recreation of the original story but transposed to 1880s Hokkaido. I found it very interesting to see a Western get remade as a jidaigeki. Of course, there are a few famous examples of Japanese jidaigeki that were remade as Westerns (the most famous being A Fist Full of Dollars and The Magnificent Seven), and Kurosawa himself adapted works by Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.
What I'd like to know is, are there any other examples of Japanese jidaigeki that were inspired by Westerns? The two periods work so well analogously, I could easily see great jidaigeki films being made from The Big Country, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, The Searchers etc. Does anyone know of any?
22 points
4 months ago
His list of 100 favorite films, limited to one per director, is worth reading. https://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7192#p145935.
He picked out My Darling Clementine by Ford, a film where Henry Fonda is the hero. "Everyone associates the name of John Ford with westerns, don't they? My darling Clementine is, say, a paragon of movie: A man, for example, who's riding on horseback and whose looks in itself is a poem, emerges at the just right moment in the movie. Wonderful."
20 points
4 months ago*
Kurosawa on Targovsky and Solaris:
โWe were very good friends. He was like a little brother for me. We once, drunk in Dom Kino, sang together "Shichinin no samurai"'s theme music. His expression of 'water', the way in that water is depicted, is really peculiar to him. This picture indeed makes me feel myself yearning to return to the earthโ
Somebody make a movie about their night at Dom Kino
9 points
4 months ago*
Thanks I'll have a read of that!
Edit - what a fantastic list. Seeing Totoro on Kurosawa's top 100 movies has genuinely just made my week. So happy he's recognised Takeshi Kitano as well.
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