Several good movies have been made from Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest
The book was about a private investigator, known only as The Continental Op, who was looking for a man in Poisonville. Two warring gangs were making life unpleasant, and they pissed the Op off after he’d only been in town a short while. So he determined to clean the town up, not out of any idealistic motive, but just because he was a super-hardass son of a bitch.
Road House Nights I have not seen.
Yojimbo, directed by Akira Kurosawa, changed the setting to feudal Japan, and instead of a detective, the hero was an errant Samurai, who was motivated by a conscience rather than by sheer piss and vinegar.
A Fist Full of Dollars was really a remake of Yojimbo. This time the story is cast as a spagetti western, with the protagonist being a fast-shooting anti-hero whose chief motive is money.
The Warrior and the Sorceress is a very bad attempt to recast A Fist Full of Dollars in a fantasy setting. The warrior, played by David Carradine, flips back his poncho and a he is wearing a bandelero with six daggers in it. It’s a bad, bad movie, and you really ought to rent it and find out for yourself.
Last Man Standing also takes after Kurosawa’s plotline more than it does the original, though it pays homage to the hardboiled American tough guy roots of Hammett’s work. It’s gorgeously brutal. This time the anti-hero is motivated by money, a personal sense of justice and compassion for others.
With all due respect to Kurosawa’s acclaimed film, overall I like the anti-hero versions of the story better. But the various approaches to this one story are fascinating. Probably some film school is teaching a class on the subject right now.