its hero, Clint Eastwood, was already a huge star due to the popularity of the TV series Rawhide. Leone would have done far better financially by obtaining Kurosawa's advance permission to use Yojimbo's script.An agreement was signed to compensate the authors of Yojimbo for the resemblance. See Frayling (2000) pp. 148–49. Requiem for a Gringo shows many traces from another well-known Japanese film, Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri. When Asian martial arts films started to draw crowds in European cinema houses, the producers of Spaghetti Westerns tried to hang on, this time not by adapting story-lines but rather by directly including martial arts in the films, performed by Eastern actors—for example Chen Lee in My Name Is Shanghai Joe or Lo Lieh teaming up with Lee Van Cleef in The Stranger and the Gunfighter. Political allegories Some Spaghetti Westerns incorporated political overtones, particularly from the political left. An example of such a film is Requiescant, featuring Italian author/film director Pier Paolo Pasolini as a major supporting character. Pasolini's character is a priest who espouses Liberation theology. The film concerns oppression of poor Mexicans by rich Anglos and ends on a call for arms but it does not fit easily as a Zapata Western, as it lacks the typical hero pair of a flamboyant Latin revolutionary and an Anglo specialist. The Price of Power serves a political allegory about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and racism. The movie concerns the assassination of an American president in Dallas, Texas by a group of Southern white supremacists who frame an innocent African American. They are opposed by an unstable partnership between a whistle-blower (Giuliano Gemma) and a political aide. Sexuality in the Spaghetti Western Though the Spaghetti Westerns from A Fistful of Dollars and on featured more violence and killings than earlier American Western films, they generally shared the parental genre's restrictive attitude toward explicit sexuality. However, in response to the growing commercial success of various shades of sex films, there was a greater exposure of naked skin in some Spaghetti Westerns, among others Dead Men Ride (1971) and Heads or Tails (1969). In the former and partly the latter, the sex scenes feature coercion and violence against women. Even though it is hinted at in some films, like Django Kill and Requiescant, open homosexuality plays a marginal part in Spaghetti Westerns. The exception is Giorgio Capitani's The Ruthless Four – in effect a