Last Man Standing **** (1996, Bruce Willis, Christopher Walken, Bruce Dern, William Sanderson) – Classic Movie Review 4927

Writer-director Walter Hill’s dark, dour and downbeat 1996 American gangster movie remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Japanese adventure Yojimbo (1961) is a thrilling action movie. It stars Bruce Willis as John Smith, Christopher Walken as Hickey, Bruce Dern as Sheriff Ed Galt and William Sanderson as Joe Monday.

Willis’s John Smith is gunslinger-for-hire drifter who finds himself in the middle of an on-going war between the Irish gang and the Italian mafia in the Prohibition-era near-ghost town of Jericho, Texas. Smith sees this as a chance to prosper by playing each side off against the other.

Hill’s original rough cut ran more than two hours but he hacked back the final theatrical version to 101 minutes. The trailers use much of the alternate or deleted footage from the rough cut.

Also in the cast are David Patrick Kelly as Doyle, Karina Lombard as Felina, Ned Eisenberg as Fredo Strozzi, Michael Imperioli as Giorgio Carmonte, R D Call as Jack McCool, Alexandra Powers as Lucy Kolinski, Ken Jenkins as Captain Tom Pickett, Ted Markland as Deputy Bob, Leslie Mann as Wanda and Patrick Kilpatrick as Finn.

After Hill was reassured that Kurosawa supported an American remake of Yojimbo, he agreed to write and direct on condition that it wasn’t a Western (there had already been a Western remake in A Fistful of Dollars), deciding to do it as a Thirties gangster film using Forties film noir film techniques.

Hill recalls: ‘This man decides that maybe he should do one good deed, even if it goes against all the rules of his life as he understands it. The action and the violence must be organic to the story. I think this is obviously by its nature a very dark and very hard movie. I don’t think this is the most brutal film imaginable. There’s actually very little blood.’

Alas, the public – and many critics – rejected its very dark and very hard tone. It tanked at the box office, but it is one of Hill’s and Willis’s best films. On a $67,000,000 budget, it took only $47,267,000 worldwide.

The plots of A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Django (1965) are also nearly the same. All four films are indebted to the plot of Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 4927

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