The ‘Corkscrew’ Journey of an Adaptation: Cultural Mobility in Hammett, Kurosawa, Leone, and Hill

Abstract

Abstract Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) has long been recognized as a quasi-adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), even if it relates much more closely to Hammett’s short story ‘Corkscrew’ (1925). Yojimbo was remade as the Italian Western Fistful of Dollars (1964) by Sergio Leone. The material finally ‘came home’ when Walter Hill adapted it as Last Man Standing (1996) that returns to the 1920s American desert town setting of the original story. This contribution seeks to examine the inflections of the individual incarnations that the material has undergone on its journey through various cultural contexts. The main argument is that the story of the outsider infiltrating a corrupt town and ‘cleansing’ it by playing off two gangs against each other has lent itself to commentary on transnational cultural exchange and mobility. ‘Corkscrew’ expresses anxiety over the integrity of cultural boundaries, Red Harvest expresses the inherent corruption of a ‘hermetic’ culture, Yojimbo uses the story to highlight the uneasy relation between tradition and Westernization in Japan while simultaneously drawing attention to Kurosawa’s status as ‘Western’ director and embraces a guarded cultural mobility, Fistful of Dollars empties the signs, icons, and narratives that make up the expressions of culture of any essentialist meanings and so stages cultural mobility as the shifting play of signifiers, endlessly transgressing acquired meanings and cultural boundaries, and Last Man Standing, finally, in reclaiming the Americanness of the story simultaneously forgoes any cultural specificity by reducing it to an excessive pastiche of prior elements.