Editing Spaghetti Western (section)

===East Asian connections===
The story of ''A Fistful of Dollars'' was closely based on [[Akira Kurosawa]]'s ''[[Yojimbo (film)|Yojimbo]]''. Kurosawa sued Sergio Leone for plagiarism, and was compensated with the exclusive distribution rights to the movie in Japan, where its hero, Clint Eastwood, was already a huge star due to the popularity of the TV series, ''Rawhide''. Leone would have done far better financially by obtaining Kurosawa's advance permission to use ''Yojimbo'''s script.<ref>{{cite book |title=Clint: The Life and Legend |first=Patrick |last=McGilligan |publisher=OR Books |year=2015 |isbn=978-1939293961}}</ref><ref>An agreement was signed to compensate the authors of ''Yojimbo'' for the resemblance. See Frayling (2000), pp. 148–49.</ref> ''[[Requiem for a Gringo]]'' shows many traces from another well-known Japanese film, [[Masaki Kobayashi]]'s ''[[Harakiri (1962 film)|Harakiri]]''.

When Asian [[martial arts film]]s started to draw crowds in European cinema houses, the producers of spaghetti Westerns tried to hang on, this time not by adapting storylines, but rather by directly including martial arts in the films, performed by Eastern actors—for example, Chen Lee in ''[[My Name Is Shanghai Joe]]'', or [[Lo Lieh]] teaming up with [[Lee Van Cleef]] in ''[[The Stranger and the Gunfighter]]''.