Yojimbo was fal suerior. the scenes fit the setting better and the plot, due to more time to flesh it out, made a lot more sense. Leone tried to cut it down and all he did is left the plot incoherent, especially around the beginning of the movie.
The spirit of abysmal despair

Fistul is better

Yojimbo by far.

My preference for Yojimbo is vast.

Yojimbo by far.
The Indians are coming, quick put your scalp in your pocket

Yojimbo 8
Fistful of Dollars 7

A Fistful of Dollars kicks Yojimbo's ass, in my book. The latter just didn't glue me to the screen like Sergio Leone's masterpiece did.

Yojimbo. No contest.
Fly? Yes. Land? No.

Yojimbo!
Top 250 Foreign Movies
http://www.imdb.com/list/ls076565151/

Both are goo movies but i prefer Yojimbo because it has more comedy in it. also the machine gun scene in fistful is really2 bad.

Leone certainly establishes his trademark style with "Fistful" and ends up creating a new genre of film. That is nothing to dismiss, but in virtually every aspect, Yojimbo excels. Eastwood is not in the same league as Mifune, for instance. In fact, the supporting players in Yojimbo are stellar, not just Mifune. As typical with Kurosawa, his film shows a wider range of the human experience, including humor, which Leone's film does not. I enjoy both versions, but the original surpasses the imitation.

Yojimbo
is the better film, but
Fistful of Dollars
is still a classic that influenced the Western genre in a very great way.
Eclectic Cinephile

My username comes from this film, but believe it or not I slightly prefer Yojimbo. Both are classics. I feel Yojimbo gets the edge because that was Kurosawa at the absolute top of his game. This film has the obvious signs of a master, but Leone didn't hit his full stride until For a Few Dollars More.
Actually Leone and Kurosawa directed my two all-time favorite films, Once Upon a Time in the West and Seven Samurai. We are talking about two masters who made several masterpieces.
I think the only wrong answer to this question is that both films are bad. I think we can all agree these movies kick ass.

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Yojimbo was better than Fistful and I don't think it is even close. The reason many like Fistful as much of not more is because of Clint Eastwood's style/stardom. We love the guy for his style, but Toshiro Mifune, we do not care much for his style.

I gotta agree with you. Apart from some exceptional acting, Yojimbo's main strength is in it's inherent simplicity. The characters just flowed naturally. AFOD is not a bad movie but following Yojimbo's style didn't work out well in many instances. For example in the scene where Eastwood announces that he wants to be hired, for the first time, seems so made up in comparison to that of Yojimbo's.

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I agree with you RRS about the relative merits of Fistful, Seven Samurai, Ikiru and Yojimbo and as a result of reading this comment added Kagemusha and Ran to my Love film list.

I prefer Fistful of Dollars.
Some of Kurosawa's weakest films were in the 60s. They were good, but not great. He had kind of lost his way and would not make another masterpiece until the 1980s with Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985). Yojimbo, like all his other 60s films, is good but not great. I was not very impressed, certainly after his great 50s classics like The Seven Samurai, Ikiru, and Rashomon.
Although A Fistful of Dollars copies from Yojimbo, it was still groundbreaking and started a whole new genre of film; which of course was the Spaghetti western. It basically changed film and had a significant affect on the film industry. I think it is a more interesting and exciting film than Yojimbo. Yojimbo kind of gets confusing and loses its way.

I think the duels in all three Dollars movies were classic. TGTBTU was certainly the best one, but the other two were epic as well.

I fault Yojimbo based on Sanjuro announcing several times from the outset that he plans to clean up the town
But then again, the two warring families in YOJIMBO were much more fleshed out, that both Toshiro Mifune
and
we the audience could see that the town was corrupt right from the outset and immediately needed cleaning up. I never really got that sense in FISTFULL, especially with the Baxter family, who I thought were more-or-less set pieces. In other words, they just didn't seem that menacing.

I fault Yojimbo based on Sanjuro announcing several times from the outset that he plans to clean up the town. That takes away an important plot element used in Fistful which is Joe starting as a neutral character who sees that there is a moral issue he needs to address - like Rick in Casablanca. Could you imagine Bogart as The Man With No Name?

Couldn't disagree more. Not only Yojimbo is the original movie; technically speaking is also better (Better directed, acted, edited and photographed). I am not saying AFOD is a bad picture. On the contrary, it's highly enjoyable and a relevant film by itself. However the dubbing was terrible (both in italian and english), the acting was kinda amateurish except for Gian Maria Volont and Clint Eastwood. Sergio Leone stylish direction is already there. Morricone's iconic music too. But they are still in a rough form. Just compare the final showdowns from AFOD vs TGTBTU. Huge difference isn't it?
Yojimbo 9/10
AFOD 7/10

Yojimbo is by a wide margin the superior work. The style and ideas behind Yojimbo make it better for repeated viewing. I loved the way Kurosawa made the whole movie through the perspective of Sanjuro, even joking about it near the end when he makes the people stop so he can witness the rival gangs slaughter each other.
Fistful plays a lot like just shot out after shot out.
Leone would go on to become a master himself though. I've recently seen Once Upon A Time In The West, which was a great genre-subverting Western, which goes to show you shouldn't write-off any director because of their first movie.