Servant of Two Masters
British critic Sir Christopher Frayling identifies three principal sources for "A Fistful of Dollars": "Partly derived from Kurosawa's samurai film "Yojimbo", partly from Dashiell Hammett's novel "Red Harvest" (1929), but most of all from Carlo Goldoni's eighteenth-century play "Servant of Two Masters"." Leone has cited these alternate sources in his defense. He claims a thematic debt, for both "Fistful" and "Yojimbo", to Carlo Goldoni's "Servant of Two Masters"—the basic premise of the protagonist playing two camps against each other. Leone asserted that this rooted the origination of "Fistful"/"Yojimbo" in European, and specifically Italian, culture. The "Servant of Two Masters" plot can also be seen in Hammett's detective novel "Red Harvest." The Continental Op hero of the novel is, significantly, a "man without a name." Leone himself believed that "Red Harvest" had influenced "Yojimbo": "Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" was inspired by an American novel of the serie-noire so I was really taking the story back home again."