`Last Man' Latest Version Of `Yojimbo'

Akira Kurosawa hasn't had an art-house hit since "Ran" more than a decade ago, and his movies have never played the malls.

Still, Western film wouldn't be the same without Japan's most revered filmmaker. The latest Kurosawa imitation is "Last Man Standing," starring Bruce Willis as a Prohibition version of the samurai hero of "Yojimbo" - one of several Kurosawa classics that have been remade here as Westerns or crime stories.

His 1954 epic, "Seven Samurai" starring Toshiro Mifune, was successfully remade six years later as "The Magnificent Seven" with Yul Brynner. "Rashomon" became "The Outrage," with Paul Newman in the Mifune role.

The robots and the princess in "Star Wars" owe a great deal to Kurosawa's magical 1958 samurai tale, "The Hidden Fortress." The 1985 Jon Voight movie, "Runaway Train," was based on a Kurosawa screenplay that Kurosawa never directed.

A zeitgeist hit

But few Kurosawa movies have had as much impact as his wide-screen 1961 samurai movie, "Yojimbo" (The Bodyguard), with Mifune playing an independent samurai who pits two corrupt rival factions against each other in a small town. More darkly humorous than Kurosawa's previous work, it was a zeitgeist hit, dispensing with samurai-movie stereotypes and capturing the iconoclastic spirit of its era.

"There is so much displacement of the usual movie conventions that we don't have the time or inclination to ask why we are enjoying the action; we respond kinesthetically," wrote critic Pauline Kael. She called it "one of the rare Japanese films that is both great and funny to American audiences."

Film historian Danny Peary describes it as "a comedy where the bad guys have the misfortune to be happened upon by a hero who can challenge and defeat them on their own amoral terms. . . . The hero, who has nothing to lose in the first place, comes back from the dead - which is what makes the Mifune figure a mythic universal hero."

Sergio Leone unofficially borrowed the plot in 1964 and turned it into the first widely seen "spaghetti Western," "A Fistful of Dollars," which made a star of Clint Eastwood as "The Man With No Name." Transposed to a Western setting, the character seems shockingly different from such mythic gunfighters as Alan Ladd's Shane, who always took the side of honest, oppressed characters.

Leone and Eastwood followed that up with "For a Few Dollars More," which was inspired by Kurosawa's more humorous "Yojimbo" sequel, "Sanjuro." Several other 1960s Westerns played with the idea of a loner without allegiances. Indeed, it's almost become an action-movie cliche.

Now Willis is tackling the role Mifune created in "Last Man Standing," Walter Hill's official non-Western "Yojimbo" remake, set in Jericho, Texas, where rival bootlegging mobs from Chicago are operating during Prohibition.

Calling himself only "John Smith," Willis is warned by the local sheriff (Bruce Dern) not to count on anyone for help. He assaults one gang's headquarters, then gets an offer from the opposition to become a kamikaze gunfighter. Cashing in on the action, he hires himself out to both sides. Hill required approval

Hill, who has directed such legend-questioning Westerns as "The Long Riders" and last year's "Wild Bill," agreed to do the picture only if Kurosawa approved. The producer, Arthur Sarkissian, bought the remake rights from the Japanese director in 1988.

"I would not have made this film had I not been completely satisfied that Mr. Kurosawa was in favor of somebody doing an adaptation," claims Hill. "It's a passionate and reverential adaptation of a classic story, which one does not take lightly."

He's not the only filmmaker who feels that way about "Yojimbo."

In the current issue of Sight and Sound magazine, writer-director John Sayles ("Lone Star") says that "Yojimbo" is "just my favorite movie."

He sees it as a story of "existentialism confronting consumerism, profit and greed, a direction that society goes once tradition and Royalty is gone . . . all of a sudden there's this guy who keeps a personal code, even if he's not in a traditional society anymore."