The best English-language remakes – As Downhill – the underwhelming US remake of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure – hits the cinemas, we present the finest reimagining of foreign-language films.
Clint Eastwood has never been hip, exactly, but there was a time when he exuded a sort of counter-culture credibility – and it’s largely down to this brilliant film from Sergio Leone, which introduced the idea of the “spaghetti western” to the world. As has been exhaustively documented, Dollars is in fact a key piece in a jigsaw of east-west cultural exchange: Leone had seen and was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 swordsman picture Yojimbo, which itself had taken key ideas from Dashiell Hammett (notably The Glass Key and Red Harvest). Leone never acknowledged the films’ similarities, and later settled out of court with Kurosawa. But Fistful’s legacy lives on: not only in its sequels, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but also in spaghetti’s enduring influence via obsessives of the Tarantino persuasion.
Learn more about this topic by reading this article on The Guardian.
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