Try, Try Again

The answer is, yes. The best sequel ever made essentially establishes what is a common, but not universal, pattern. That sequel (it was not called a sequel in this country) was "The Road Warrior" here and "Mad Max 2" everywhere else. Made by the Aussie George Miller (an actual doctor who eventually, despite his great talent and success, gave up filmmaking and went back to medicine), it suggests the path to sequel greatness.

In the best-case sequel scenario, the first film is entirely a breaking-in period, a test drive, if you will. "Mad Max," a post-apocalyptic road movie with cars and trucks as weapons, set upon the flat, bleak, scurvy plains of the Australian Outback, features the very young Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, a Highway Patrolman, with wife and kid. Civilization has almost but not quite broken down and only the lonely Highway Patrolmen in the 348 cc, dual-carb prowl cars stand between us and chaos. Miller had a true gift for poetic kinetics and outsize characters. He basically put the standard-issue mythic Lone Gunman B-Western on tires, shocks, roll bars and a double-hemi engine and played it out, to modest but not staggering success.

But that movie somehow freed him up to really hit the ball out of the park in "The Road Warrior," with more money, much better art direction, a wider, more resonant story. But the most important thing was this: Miller still had feelings for the character. He still believed in the character, the world, the relationships, the story.

What destroys sequels and in so many cases turns them into drivel, as all the "Jaws" jobs have been, is that the original authors (or auteurs) wanted to move on. They couldn't face whoever it was -- police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) in "Jaws," for example -- again. This happened to no less a sequel genius than A. Conan Doyle, who grew so sick unto death of Sherlock Holmes that he killed him off. Readers forced him to raise the dead.

A better story features the great crime writer Charles Willeford, who finally hit the big time with a novel called "Miami Blues," about a tough cop named Hoke Moseley. But evidently Willeford soured on Moseley in the writing of the book and so to divorce himself from the character, he wrote a sequel called "Grimhaven," which, it is said, utterly contaminated the Hoke Moseley pool. Random House wouldn't publish it. However, by that time, "Miami Blues" had become a much bigger hit than anyone had anticipated -- it's a splendid novel, by the way -- and Willeford was talked out of his clearly self-immolative impulse. As a consequence, "Grimhaven" has never been published (though rumors persist that Xeroxes are available if you know someone who knows someone; I know no one). Willeford wrote three more Hoke Moseley novels. He must have hated every page, but guess what: Like the first one, they are superb, twisted, funny little novels.

Which gets to another weird movie category: sequels that should happen but don't. "Miami Blues" did become a movie, quite a good one, starring Fred Ward, who'd just broken through as Gus Grissom in "The Right Stuff," as Hoke; it was all set for sequelization. It never happened. Who knows why? You can certainly understand why there wasn't a "The Bridge on the River Kwai II," or an "English Patient: The Bandages Come Off." But why was there no "Jagged Edge II: Joe Eszterhas Tells the Same Story Yet AGAIN"?

And then there's still a weirder category: sequels that become something else. In '61, the great Akira Kurosawa made a superb if lighthearted samurai film with Toshiro Mifune called "Yojimbo" ("Bodyguard"). A huge hit, it spawned a sequel called "Sanjuro" only because nobody in Japan was smart enough to see the potential in the title "Yojimbo II." This is the character sent up by John Belushi on "Saturday Night Live" in the '70s, the grumpy, itchy, unkempt freelance samurai. Unfortunately, somewhere in there Mifune and Kurosawa had a falling-out, so the third "Bodyguard" film was made by Hiroshi Inagaki, who had made a '50s trilogy with Mifune based on the life of the great samurai Miyamoto Musashi. That same year, Mifune for the fourth time played a nameless sword slinger, this time in "Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo," in which the great Japanese actor was paired with still another great Japanese actor Shintaro Katsu. This was actually a rare -- possibly unique -- "double sequel," in that it continued the Kurosawa character but was actually part of another series of sequels run by Katsu's production company.

But it gets twistier still. Somehow the great director Hideo Gosha came into the situation and decided to make yet another "Yojimbo," and got Mifune all signed up. Everybody went happily north to Hokkaido, the snow island, and then Mifune didn't want to make the Yojimbo sequel. Whether he had cold feet or "cold feet" is unknown; he was gone, and in a panic Gosha called Tatsuya Nakadai. Of course, without Mifune, there was no Yojimbo character, and so the production mutated in certain ways and eventually reached the public as "Goyokin" ("Gold"), which is one of the best samurai films ever made.

So if "The Road Warrior" is the best sequel ever made, "Yojimbo V" with Toshiro Mifune is the best sequel never made.