Movies
Several prominent directors of Samurai films and Westerns in the 1950s and 60s shared a mutual admiration and openly made their art with direct reference to one another. In Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant movie Yojimbo, for instance, a masterless samurai played by the sublime Toshiro Mifune is standing at a crossroads and throws a stick up in the air to “decide” which direction to go. The scene is a direct reference to the John Ford film Young Mr. Lincoln, in which Ford’s version of the American president does the exact same thing. The Western remake of Kurosawa’s classic The Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven. In fact, the mutual “admiration” between purveyors of the two genres became so intimate that Kurosawa was forced to sue Sergio Leone over the movie A Fistful of Dollars, which was clearly a plagiarized version of Yojimbo by Leone.
