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Dashiel Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest proves to be enduring even into the 21st Century, but who would've imagined it spawning a samurai film, a Western and finally a gangster picture (itself with liberal doses of cowboy and the way of the sword)?

Red Harvest is a tale of rival factions in "Poisonville" and the mysterious Continental Op who plays them against each other. It's all coming back now, right? Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing...

The Continental Op is a figure that is never given a name or a physical description. He is very much the existential figure that Jim Kitses discusses in his Western discourse, Horizons West - someone who defines himself in the wilderness by his code. It is not a code handed down by a religion or even a philosophy, nor is it merely bestial. In fact, what defines our hero is his honor is the face of bestiality, a code of honor forged out one's discovered integrity and choices. It might seem the obvious direction of analysis might be some Joseph Campbell sacred warrior thesis, but I'm more interested in Hammett's development of a post-industrial hero that Kurosawa, Leone and Hill liked dialing backwards to redefine the genres they were working in.

The Continental Op foreshadows 007 and all secret agents with numbers tacked onto their names (finally questioned with The Prisoner's mantra: "I am not a number, I am a human being"). Hammett is essentially a moral man, and in the best sense of the word, a Communist, i.e. a man interested in fairness, "each according to his means," however misguided or outdated Marx's 19th Century utopian hopes would eventually become. This is also a view forged out of a godless universe, but the Continental Op is not James Bond, who gets to indulge all appetites and get away with it. Bond is amoral with the thinnest veneer of civilization because he happens to work for a "moral" Empire. Bond's popularity has its roots in Playboy magazine, not Karl Marx. Red Harvest was a book Bernardo Bertolucci hoped to make for years, for it is clearly shared the same view as his own 1900. Bertolucci's disenchantment with Communism can be seen later in The Last Emperor, where the Emperor, however elitist, is a sympathetic figure in a Maoist machine of crushing would-be equality. Even so, Hammett's Red Harvest is such a thinly disguised and cynical critique of capitalism and its corrupting influence on government, it might only be made in the current climate of X-Files, Alias and even Resident Evil - definitely a post-Watergate, -Contragate and bought-presidency world. It resonates with Brando's choice to play The Godfather because the Mafia mirrored the corporate world.

Hammett's prose in general, with its terse yet imagistic journalism, was an obvious influence on an early William Burroughs, but the Continental Op can be felt even in Burroughs' later cut-up work like Nova Express (where his own text is randomly cut and re-arranged in a kind of marijuana I Ching). In Nova Express and beyond, the Continental Op morphs into an intergalactic agent who ceases to even know whether his orders are authentic, becoming the ultimate arbitrator of his fate, morality and even identity.

Before we are suitably astonished by Akira Kurosawa's refashioning of Continental Op into samurai, we must remember that Yojimbo (1961) only goes back less than one century, as is clearly shown by Tatsuya Nakadai brandishing a revolver (anti-hero star of the later samurai noir Sword of Doom, a fascinating Paul Schrader influence in itself). So Yojimbo is already a kind of Eastern Western, and the leap to Fistful of Dollars is more intercontinental than time travel from medieval Japan. All the more fitting when the later non-Kurosawa vehicle Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo clearly assimilates the Italian Western in mid-sixties color & Cinemascope. The biggest change that Yojimbo introduces to Hammett's Continental Op is the foreshadowing of the existential horse opera so refined by Leone and Peckinpah. Political ideologies do not exist in these dusty landscapes. Here the sacred warrior and the existential hero meet in full circle. Yojimbo (which means "Bodyguard" and is as generic a name as Continental Op - if far more cynical given the corpse count) seems to have integrity by default, if only an inculcated non-theist Buddhist equanimity he refuses to shake off. He is surrounded by thieves who have shaken everything but the vices that suit them. Still a critique of the origins and manifestation of then-current Japanese capitalism's lack of honor, Yojimbo is a humanist rather than Marxist Red Harvest. Again two gangs are played against each other, with not so much a triumph of the uncorrupted as a Shinto-like force of nature pressing the re-set button. Yojimbo mirrors the aggression he encounters and moves with the interpenetrating life force of the Zen archery master. His elegance is Neitzchean, and this is what defeats his enemies. It will be the guiding principle in the remakes to come.

The DVD: Criterion tells us that this new digital transfer was created from a 35mm composite fine-grain master and is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio. Why then does it look like a 16mm print and why are the credits cut off at the borders? A major disappointment from such a reputable source - maybe this is the best they could find. The same can probably be said for the Dolby Digital Mono soundtrack.

Sergio Leone's 1964 Fistful of Dollars is a film that looks better and better with age. Originator of the style derisively termed "spaghetti western", both he and composer Ennio Morricone have slowly managed to earn respect. Quite simply a rip-off of Yojimbo that Kurosawa immediately insisted on being paid for, it is so elegantly re-worked and stylistically fresh that Leone is easily forgiven for trying to get an idea cheaply - a tradition rarely punished in the Industry, internationally or otherwise. It is amazing that this film began so many of the signifying visuals that survive recognizably even into a recent weed killer TV spot. However baroque and over the top Leone was, his greatest moments do rival Kurosawa for vistas and editing that can be traced back from these directors to John Ford himself. Toshiro Mifune's toothpick is replaced with Clint Eastwood's cigar, both sport a few weeks of stubble, and both strike like lightning. Eastwood is never called the Man with No Name (a term apparently developed in the ad campaign), but continues to fulfill the grimy honor Mifune's Yojimbo down to saving a beautiful woman for reasons of decency rather than lust. It is a plot point that stretches back to Red Harvest. Even in this godless world, the innocent deserve rescue, but as Burroughs says, "Paranoia is having all the facts."

The DVD: This dual-layered transfer from a widescreen anamorphic source is decent, but not up to the later topnotch standards of MGM/UA's DVDs - it looks a little faded. Again, a Dolby Digital Mono soundtrack is hardly a big thrill, but the original had that nostalgic and obvious dubbed English and foley sound anyway - wooden spoons in food bowls that sound so wonderfully phony and that high-pitched Cinecitta gunshot of the 60's.

Walter Hill is a director more commercially than critically respected. His track record has been uneven, but I have found both his writing and directing, as well as production efforts (such as Alien), to be highly rewarding. Remember, it is Hill who adapted Jim Thompson in Pekinpah's Getaway long before Thompson was hip again, and Hill is the only other director besides Leone and Robert Aldrich to really understand Charles Bronson's screen presence and helps deliver Bronson's fullest performance in Hill's first film Hard Times. Hill's use of color has often been overlooked, but he consistently delivers a palette that is beyond the expectations of the commercial vehicles he works in, as evidenced by the misty and sometimes glaring neon impressionisms of Red Heat, The Long Riders, 48 Hours, Johnny Handsome and the film we will know discuss, 1996's Last Man Standing. Here Bruce Willis is a traveling loner who happens to carry two .45s. Kurosawa is credited as the source, so we understand that even if we are back in a time period close to Red Harvest, we are dealing with a vehicle at once Western and samurai. Willis has aged to where he reminds us of Bogart, an archetype that says pages in its hard-boiled silence (and brings us full circle to one of the finest personifications of Hammett on screen, Bogart's Sam Spade). Willis, who is also given no name, is a perfect foil for the icon of Hill's best driven pieces, a man whose wound is now scar tissue, and whether we're talking the philosophy of Neitzche or Conan the Barbarian, the wounding has made him strong. It is a simplistic and idealistic cartoon solution, but who doesn't hope to bring their suffering to the path? Willis can have the same bashed sensitivity of Bronson and Bogart, and Hill brings this to a character that, however artfully drawn, had thus far only been a vehicle of enviable efficiency.

The DVD: The first-rate transfer lets us see Hill at his best - the Dust Bowl cinematography is gorgeous. The Ry Cooder score is among the musician's more interesting and unpredictable, with a Morricone-like main theme in Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.

A samurai film, a Western and a gangster picture... Like placing Shakespeare in a different time, our concepts get shaken out and the archetypes shine more brightly. So what remains for Red Harvest? Clearly a science fiction - John Sayles already re-penned The Seven Samurai as Battle Beyond the Stars. When New Line originally bought the rights to Yojimbo, it was conceived as occurring in the near future, probably along the lines of Road Warrior. But an outer space colony version? With a female alien Yojimbo? Directors of development, I'll be waiting for my check.

And that will be when Astro-Hell freezes over.

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