Tarantino has also been criticized for borrowing concepts, scenes and dialogue from other films. [3] For example, the general plot of Reservoir Dogs was borrowed from Ringo Lam's City on Fire. [4] [verification needed] Stanley Kubrick's The Killing is a direct influence on the fractured narrative structure (Lionel White, author of the novel Clean Break which The Killing was based on, was given a dedication in the end credits of Reservoir Dogs) while the idea of the color-coded criminals is taken from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. The infamous ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs resembles a scene in Sergio Corbucci's 1966 Spaghetti Western classic Django, in which a man's ear is cut off and fed to him before he is shot dead.
The Don Siegel version of The Killers played an influence on Pulp Fiction, and the events of the adrenaline-injection scene closely resemble a story related in Martin Scorsese's documentary American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince. The line about going "to work on the homies here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch" is similar to "You know what kind of people they are. They'll strip you naked and go to work on you with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch" from another Don Siegel film, 1971's Charley Varrick.
Several scenes from the Fellini masterwork 8½ were directly imitated in Pulp Fiction. The dancing scene in the diner is an imitation of a scene in Godard's "Band of Outsiders", the film which Tarantino named his production company after.
The misquoted bible verse Samuel Jackson recites in Pulp Fiction can also be found in the movie Karate Kiba (a 1970s Japanese action film starring Sonny Chiba, also known as The Bodyguard), which Tarantino has mentioned in interviews with The New York Times and Positif. The title crawl of the movie contains the line:
The path of the righteous man and defender is beset on all sides by the iniquity of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper, and the father of lost children. And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious anger, who poison and destroy my brothers; and they shall know that I am Chiba the Bodyguard when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.
Kill Bill Vol. 1 is heavily influenced by the 1973 Toshiya Fujita film Lady Snowblood. The fighting scene where the The Bride duels as back lit silhouettes is almost a direct copy of a similar scene in the 1998 Hiroyuki Nakando film Samurai Fiction. The Superman monologue delivered at the end of Kill Bill Vol. 2 was inspired by a passage from Jules Feiffer's 1965 book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, which Tarantino confirmed in a 2004 interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Much debate has been sparked on when such references cease to be tributes and become plagiarism. Tarantino, for his part, has always been open and unapologetic about appropriating ideas from films he admires. When confronted about stealing ideas from dozens of movies, he stated, "I lift ideas from other great films just like every other great filmmaker."
