After making friends with bartender Joe (played by everyone’s favorite “that guy” William Sanderson) and meeting the local sheriff, Willis – naming himself “John Smith” – sidles between the Irish mob and an Italian Mafia group in town, playing both sides against each other with two. Willis rolls into Jericho – which would be a ghost town if it wasn’t for the mobsters – and immediately gets into trouble with an Irish mob. Set in Jericho, Texas in the early 1930s, Last Man Standing is a straight gangster movie with plenty of guns, masculism, and corpses that one should expect.
Last Man Standing, written and directed by man-movie auteur Walter Hill, placed Bruce Willis as the titular hero. The Coen Brothers’ tongue-in-cheek Miller’s Crossing was a throwback to vintage film noir, with Gabriel Byrne chasing his hat between beatings from roscoe-toting gang thugs and political bosses. In the 1990s, two additional versions were made of the story, both set in the Prohibition era. Three years later, Clint Eastwood was catapulted to stardom in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, which moved the setting to a border town in the Old West. In 1961, Kurosawa filmed Yojimbo, where a ronin showed up in a warring town, allied himself with a sake dealer, and ended the day – after plenty of katana action – as the last man standing. The novel was loosely translated onto the screen for 1942’s The Glass Key and, soon, the story was soon standardized as a lone drifter of few words showing up in town, befriending a bartender, and taking on two criminal gangs.
Last Man Standing is one of many film adaptations of the classic “man-playing-two-corrupt-factions-against-the-other” story that originated in modern culture with Dashiell Hammett’s 1927 novel Red Harvest. Willis’ Costumer: Lori Stilson Background Vitalsīruce Willis as John Smith, mysterious mob gun-for-hire Bruce Willis as John Smith in Last Man Standing (1996).
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