“How … were We Going to make a Picture that's Better than this?”

Remakes have exploded onto American screens recently, becoming a staple of studio output. Nothing is sacred and even canonical texts such as Psycho (1960) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) have been remade. Remakes have a long history both in Hollywood and outside it when it comes to westerns. I am interested in what happens to the music when a remake crosses generic and national borders. One of the most iconic western film scores of all time is Elmer Bernstein’s for The Magnificent Seven (1960). But of course, it first saw light as a samurai film, Seven Samurai (1954) directed by Akira Kurosawa and scored by Fumio Hayasaka in Japan. Sergio Leone remade another Kurosawa samurai masterpiece, Yojimbo (1961), scored by Masuro Sato, ¹ as a so-called spaghetti western in Italy, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), with a Hollywood star in its lead and Ennio Morricone composing its iconic score. I will be focusing here on another pair of films which begin with a Japanese genre film and end with a Hollywood one: Kurosawa’s jidaigeki drama Rashomon (1950), scored by Hayasaka, and Martin Ritt’s western The Outrage (1964), scored by Alex North.