Tag: Akira Kurosawa

No Regrets For Our Youth [わが青春に悔なし/Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi] (1946)

Those Who Make Tomorrow

***This Review Contains Spoilers***

During the postwar occupation of Japan from 1945-1952, Japanese films had to be approved by the American occupying forces. This brings about the great paradox regarding No Regrets For Our Youth (わが青春に悔なし/ Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi). How did American authorities approve a film that commemorates a leftist? The film is a clear disavowal of the Japanese military state (authoritarian, fascist, however you may want to describe it) that existed before the Japanese surrender (“The War is Lost, But Freedom is Restored“) and is big in its theme of the glorification of the individual, views far more in line with the American ideology. I can only speculate that the American authorities were willing to overlook the former because of the latter.

Despite its political backdrop (and even some of the overt imagery as seen in the third act), No Regrets For Our Youth has a much greater focus on being a deeply human story. Yukie Yagihara (Setsuko Hara), the daughter of a professor at Kyoto Imperial University, spends a sunny, peaceful day in 1933 with a group of the male alumni on the hills surrounding the city. As they are trying to cross a creek together, Yukie needs help at the end. The gawky and indecisive Itokawa (Akitake Kono) looks on without taking any action, while the confident Ryukichi Noge (Susumu Fujita) strides over to pick her up, much to the annoyance of the timid Itokawa, setting up the film’s love triangle. As they indulge in the whims of carefree youth, little do they know this is the calm before the storm, as gunshots suddenly rage from the university in protest against the suppression of academic freedom.

No Regrets For Our Youth is a film of modest means but largely succeeds in covering the 12-year period of time from 1933 to 1945. Even at this early stage in his career, director Akira Kurosawa’s work was displaying such dynamic use of the camera, especially during the aforementioned excursion to the hills (just how close is the camera to the river’s water in the film’s opening?). In his first post-war film, No Regrets For Our Youth is a massive leap for the director in comparison to his work during the war years (comparing No Regrets For Our Youth to The Most Beautiful from two years earlier is night & day in more ways than one). The film’s first act, however, is its weakest, relying quite heavily on some rather clunky montages to cover student protests at Kyoto Imperial University over academic freedom. Following this, however, the film quickly becomes deeply involving, thanks in no small part to an extraordinary performance by Setsuko Hara, in what is Kurosawa’s only film with a sole female protagonist.

Hara’s performance in No Regrets For Our Youth showcases why she is one of the greatest actresses to ever grace the silver screen. She has the ability to express profound emotion through the simplest gestures and convey so much and so precisely without words. The strongest demonstration of this (and my favourite scene in the movie), is when Yukie and Noge meet again for the first time in years in his Tokyo office. The intensely claustrophobic scene runs seven minutes in length, as Yukie and Noge converse in the empty office building about the nostalgic days of old. With its westernised office setting and intense, drenched shadows, the scene is visually reminiscent of a Hollywood production, with Hara’s striking facial expressions being imprinted onto your psyche, creating a scene I was deeply moved by.

The journey which Yukie takes over the course of the film is what would now be referred to as “finding yourself” (but not in a ridiculous, cliché manner in which someone travels to an eastern land to meet a monk in a cave to gain otherworldly knowledge). This is established through the film’s love triangle between Yukie and polar opposites of the virgin Itokawa and the chad Noge. Yukie is drawn to Noge and his dangerous yet thrilling life as a social activist on the edge of society. On the other hand, she can choose the meek and mild-mannered Itokawa, a man of the system who goes with the flow. Life with him would be stable, safe, but ultimately boring. Noge is not afraid to tell Yukie off and reprimand her for her political illiteracy (“He’s just telling the truth, something you are incapable of doing”) following her professor father (Denjirō Ōkōchi) losing his position due to his opposition to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Following this (and to further hammer the difference between these two men), out of frustration with Noge’s comments, Yukie asks Itokawa to kneel down, to which he obliges, only to then tell him to stop and asks, “What are you doing!?”.

There are indications throughout the early portion of the story that only does Yukie desire a life of excitement but that she also doesn’t fit in with conventional society. In the aforementioned opening scene on the hills surrounding the university, Yukie actually becomes excited by the sounds of the gunshots (“It’s so clear and rhythmic. It makes my heart race!”. Likewise, her mother mentions that in elementary school, she only drew things like aeroplanes and locomotives, suggesting her non-conformist streak outside of traditionally expected roles. Later, to her mother’s approval, Yukie takes up flower arranging; however, she feels that none of her arrangements truly represent how she feels. In one class, frustrated, she disassembles her work and proceeds to throw three petals into a bowl, representing herself, Noge and Itokawa. Additionally, a very strange moment worth mentioning is the editing when Yukie enters a room to get away from her mother while in a state of despair; she stands by the door as 5 different fade-in shots occur over the same frame. Initially, I presumed this was to convey the passing of time, but then the mother is still there on the other side, as if she has been standing there for a comically long period of time.

Yukie later moves to Tokyo, where she meets Noge once again, and the two start a relationship. The character of Noge himself was inspired by the real-life case of Hotzumi Ozaki, the only Japanese person to be hanged for treason against the Japanese state during World War II. The two lovebirds live together in domestic bliss; however, this is quickly cut short when Noge is arrested on charges of espionage. Noge dies in prison, although the film does not state how this happens (I can only guess that he got Epstein’d). Following Noge’s arrest and passing, Yukie becomes more politically enlightened about Japan’s oppressive state, although it could be argued her decisions seem tied more to her love for Noge than to any firm political belief. No Regrets For Our Youth does a very convincing job of showing Yukie’s ageing over the 12-year span. What is shocking, however, especially after becoming accustomed to seeing Hara as a goddess of domesticity in the Ozu films, is her brutalisation when she spends time in prison (also under espionage accusations) and, shortly after, her transformation into a hardened agrarian woman. After Yukie is bailed from prison, instead of returning to live with her parents, she finds the estranged parents of Noge in an unnamed rural village and asks to move in and assist them.

During this portion of the film, Yukie works in the fields, and it is filmed in the manner of a Soviet propaganda film, akin to the works of Alexander Dovzhenko. Just as Soviet cinema shows upward shots of giant figures working the earth, No Regrets For Our Youth employs this same style to give Yukie a heroic stature. Yet despite the cinematographic influence, this portion of the film (even more significantly than the rest of the picture) is about defiance against the collective, with Kurosawa glorifying the individual characters, not the farmers as a collective. Noge’s parents have been ostracised by the rest of the village due to their son’s political activities, with their home being covered in graffiti denouncing them as a house of spies. As a result, Yukie and Noge’s mother (Haruko Sugimura) only work the fields at night, until Yukie defies the onlooking villagers and chooses to work during the day, to the point of physical exhaustion and sickness (in Soviet Russia, you don’t work field, field works you).

“The War is Lost, But Freedom is Restored“, states a title card as the story wraps up in a newly American-occupied Japan. Yukie’s father has his position as professor at the university restored, and the late Noge is venerated. While it feels like things have come full circle back to those peaceful, innocent days on the hills outside Kyoto back in 1933, Yukie is no longer the girl she was back then. The film concludes with Yukie hitching a ride on the back of a truck to participate in an organisation called the Rural Cultural Movement, as a defiant Yukie chooses her own path. No Regrets For Our Youth doesn’t state a reason why Yukie chose to undergo the intense hardship in the village, but I believe it’s not difficult to identify her reasons for doing so: trying to uphold the memory of a lost lover, guilt over a misspent youth, or not having been more active in political movements. Above all, however, I believe this is what was required for Yukie to undergo a metamorphosis, to achieve a quiet, indomitable pride and ultimately to free herself from having no regrets for her youth.

The Bad Sleep Well [The Worse The Villian, The Better They Sleep/悪い奴ほどよく眠る/Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru/] (1960)

The Corporations Sit There In Their Corporation Buildings And See, They’re All Corporationy And They Make Money

***This Review Contains Spoilers***

The Bad Sleep Well (悪い奴ほどよく眠る/ Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru, which translates to The Worse The Villain, The Better They Sleep) is Akira Kurosawa’s loose adaptation of Hamlet. By replacing the kings and queens of ye olden days with the chairmen of mega corporations, Kurosawa transports Shakespeare’s tale to the (then) contemporaneous sinister underworld of corporate Japan (in which the opening music score by Masaru Sato infuses jazz in with primal toms-toms as a perfect musical metaphor for this deadly urban jungle). Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) marries Yoshiko (Kyoko Kagawa), the daughter of wealthy industrialist Iwabuchi (Masayuki Mori), in an attempt to avenge the death of his father, of whom he believes Iwabuchi and his corporation are to blame. This, however, is only scratching the surface of a bizarre revenge scheme. Is Nishi’s wild and crazy plan to be or not to be?

The Bad Sleep Well has one of cinema’s most intriguing and unique first acts. The plot, characters and relationships are established through the wedding of Nishi and Yoshiko. This is not your average ceremony, however. Rather, it is a public, voyeuristic and somewhat dystopian affair swarming with journalists in which the main focus is not on the coming together of two families but rather a focus on corporate business. The wedding not only acts as the tying of a union between a man and a woman, but more so the amalgamation of the fictional entities of Dairyu Construction and Public Corp. Whereas in Hamlet the titular protagonist stages a play referencing his father’s murder, watching for the King’s reaction to the scene to ascertain whether he did commit the crime in question, in The Bad Sleep Well Nishi  (unbeknownst to the attendees) has the most bizarre and superlative wedding cake delivered. A cake which is modelled after the company headquarters with a rose marking the window from which Nishi’s father plunged to his death. Aside from the intriguing, bizarre nature of this opening 20 minutes, the sequence is also made highly effective by the chatter of the onlooking journalists as well as the wedding narrator, acting as an effective way to deliver exposition – as a viewer, you become just as curious as the onlooking media men. The sequence concludes with a fitting meta-reference by two of the journalists: “Best one act I’ve ever seen.” “One act? This is just the prelude.”

The not-so-benevolent conglomerate that is Public Corp are sending officials instructing people to take their own lives or else an assassin will be sent out to do so. This is seen early in the film when a man is told by company officials, “You’ll carry this through until the end”, and immediately proceeds to throw himself in front of a moving car. With this threat in place, a government official named Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara) attempts to commit suicide by throwing himself into a volcano (and I thought Hara-Kiri was hardcore), but is prevented from doing so by Nishi (in order that he can use Wada to expose Public Corp). I might be able to accept Nishi knows about Wada’s attempt to commit suicide, but how does he know the location where he intends to do so? Likewise, at the volcano itself, Nishi waits until he can make a bad-ass entrance, even though Wada has had the opportunity to go ahead and jump into the volcano – typical movie-land logic.

In The Bad Sleep Well, Mifune is clean-shaven and suited up with specs. Yet, Mifune has the ability to play such a dorky-looking character and still look cool (“Well, well, a big muscle-bound nerd”). Likewise, he is playing a male secretary in Japan circa 1960, although no reference is made to working in a traditionally female job being beneath him. Nishi, however, is not a man you want to get on the wrong side of. From his unsettling use of a whistle motif (similar to that which is seen in Fritz Lang’s M), to going full Christian Bale’s Batman through extorting a man by hanging him out of the same window his father supposedly committed suicide. He even torments the already suicidal Wada even more by showing him his own funeral (itself a dystopian affair in which a corporation itself shows its respect by laying two huge wreaths).

Nishi’s plan, however, is complicated by the fact that he inadvertently finds himself falling in love with Yoshiko, stating he can’t take advantage of the girl after being “touched by her innocent nature on their wedding night”. Yoshiko is particularly vulnerable due to having limb length discrepancy (one leg is longer than the other), due to a motorcycling accident. In a film full of humanity at its worst, the sweet and sentimental love story within does act as a counterbalance. We get classic aborted kiss cliché, but I do appreciate films of many decades past never partaking in the dreaded liar-revealed cliché. Yoshiko’s feelings towards Nishi are reciprocated even when she is fully aware of his plan, rather than having that scene in every contemporary rom-com (you know the one); “No Yoshiko-chan, I can explain!”. Nishi, however, is not alone in his revenge plan, as he is assisted in creating a fake identity by his long-time friend and war buddy, Itakura (Takeshi Kato). There is something endearing about their bromance in that friends could be so tight to the point that he is willing to assist in such an elaborate plan. Like, yes, I will help you switch identity and use my car-repair store as a hideout in order to help you marry into a family so that you can expose an evil corporation. 

The most contentious aspect of The Bad Sleep Well, however, is that of Nishi’s death. His murder occurs off-screen and is described to the viewer by Itakura, in a reverse of the classic “show, don’t tell rule” of storytelling. I am off two minds on this aspect of the story. On the one hand, it comes as a big shock to be told Nishi has suddenly been killed, and like the characters hiding out in the bombed-out factory, you can feel their palpable sense of anger and disappointment. On the other hand, for a movie which in many ways was very over the top with its jumping-into-volcanoes levels of shenanigans, it does feel quite anti-climactic. Yet, in a way, this anti-climax feels somewhat appropriate. After all, this is a story in which the bad guys win. The Public Corporation Vice President, Iwabuchi is a perfect representation of the banality of evil. While he has a human side when he is seen being a homely, domestic figure as he cooks dinner at home for his children, he is the head of a corporation which literally Jeffery Epsteins anyone how could speak out of turn with their Clinton-style body count and can shut down stories in the media, Hunter Biden laptop style (it’s hard to watch The Bad Sleep Well and not find analogies through the lens of 2020’s online political discourse). Iwabuchi speaks of his plans to run for political office, so it’s your best guess at what happens next. 

Good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

The Silent Duel [The Quiet Duel/静かなる決闘/Shizukanaru kettô] (1949)

Anyway, How Is Your Sex Life?

***This Review Contains Spoilers***

For unknown reasons, The Silent Duel (with other sources calling it The Quiet Duel) is the one Akira Kurosawa movie which has been neglected. This unsung medical melodrama has no high-quality re-master, no Criterion Collection release whilst my own hard-to-find UK DVD itself comes with some very unattractive packaging and although perfectly watchable, the frame rate is overly smooth in places (unless you’re reading this at a future date in which in a 4K release packed with bonus features exists).

The opening wartime sequence of The Silent Duel is a superb showcase of atmospheric filmmaking from a real master of cinema. Kurosawa employs his trademark use of the elements within a makeshift medical centre as the sight and sound of rain beats down alongside an irritating drip of water and the flickering of lights distracts a surgeon and his aides while their faces are dripping with sweat (not-to-mention doctors who are smoking on the job). Right off the bat, The Silent Duel is a film with many a shot of superb composition with the moment which impressed me the most in this opening prologue is the dramatic tension created by a truck driving past in the background just at the moment when Dr. Kyoji Fujisaki (Toshiro Mifune) discovers he has contracted syphilis. Dr. Fujisaki’s transaction of syphilis is through no fault of his own, rather he received it through the blood of a patient he was operating on, although due to the stigma he chooses to tell no one he has sexually transmitted disease and secretly begins injecting himself with salvarsan as a treatment.

Following the opening wartime prologue, the majority of The Silent Duel takes place in a run-down hospital in an unnamed, bombed-out city circa 1946. Like Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel from the previous year, the story and the setting may be interpreted in a metaphoric sense that reflects the state of Japan following the war. The main driver of conflict in The Silent Duel is that of Dr. Fujisaki refusing to tell his fiancée Misao Matsumoto (Miki Sanjo) about his condition and calling of their marriage with his justification being that he knows she will spend the best years of her young life waiting for him to recover. However, is this act as noble as it first appears or is it one of pure selfishness to make him feel better about himself in this thought-provoking conundrum? His absence of trust in Misao causes her extraordinary pain and robs her of the ability to make her own decision about the matter. The scene in which Misao comes to visit Fujisaki one more time before going to marry another man is utterly heartbreaking. The two can barely look at each other in the face and it’s clearly evident she still so desperately loves him and wants to play the role of his housewife as they take one last cup of tea in the hospital kitchen in which she used to assist in. I feel like I want to shout at the screen, “just tell her the truth, you absolute cretin!”.

Notwithstanding, the big show-stealer of The Silent Duel is Noriko Sengoku as the probationary nurse Rui Minegishi. The downtrodden, scruffy, snarky, cynical character was rescued by Dr. Fujisaki and given a job after she tried to take her own life upon becoming pregnant. The character goes through a remarkable arc of maturity as she gives birth to her baby, studies to become a nurse, metamorphoses a more presentable appearance and acts as a wonderful counterpoint to the long-suffering doctor. There is even a hint at a relationship blossoming between the two after she outright tells him that she loves him although this is never drawn upon again. The Silent Duel is based on the play The Abortion Doctor by Kazuo Kikuta. I’ve been informed an abortion does actually occur in the play whereas none takes place in the film. Dr. Fujisaki criticizes Miss Minegishi for wanting an abortion and even goes as far as calling her a monster. Whether or not The Silent Duel could be classified as a pro-life film, it does take a celebratory tone when it comes to childbirth.

If I were to complain about one aspect of The Silent Duel, it would be the film’s score. The majority of the film features no music and thus alongside its subject matter, it has that same feeling present in American pre-code films (which feature little-to-no music scores) of which I particularly enjoy. When music is used it is over-the-top and interferes with the drama rather than contributing to it. In one extremely odd use of music during the scene in which Fujisaki’s father (the only instance Takashi Shimura played Mifune’s father in their many film pairings) reacts to finding out his son has syphilis, I am not joking, I thought there was an ice cream van driving through my street. The Silent Duel is the only Kurosawa film scored by Akira Ifukube (who would go on to compose for the Godzilla franchise), and I can only speculate if Kurosawa wasn’t pleased with the music.

The Silent Duel could be viewed as a public information film on how syphilis ruins lives. Towards the film’s end, Dr. Fujisaki has a powerful, emotional breakdown in front of Miss Minegishi, as he lets it all bare regarding his restrained sexual desires brought about by his syphilis (“But one day because of the blood of a shameless guy, my body became dirty without knowing any pleasure”). The Silent Duel is the only Kurosawa film to deal to really deals with themes of a sexual nature, from a filmography which is otherwise very much asexual. Man gets an STD without getting laid, perhaps that’s the greatest tragedy of all present in The Silent Duel.

Red Beard [赤ひげ/Akahige] (1965)

Goodness, Truth & Beauty

***This Review Contains Spoilers***

Films about medicine do hold a particular interest to me as they often make for great vehicles which to explore the human condition. Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, although set towards the end of Japan’s Edo period in the mid-19th century, presents no historical or geographical disconnect as the themes present are so universal. Red Beard is the final film of what I call the Kurosawa medical trilogy after Drunken Angel and The Quiet Duel but more significantly would be the final picture in the 16-film collaboration between Toshiro Mifune and Kurosawa, bringing to end Kurosawa’s greatest period.

The ambitious production shows Kurosawa at the height of his powers, and if the behind the scenes stories are to be believed, it would appear the great filmmaker was bordering on megalomania. For one it would appear Kurosawa employed the Erich Von Stroheim method of having things on set which never actually appear on camera. According to IMDB, drawers on set were filled with medical supplies from the time period even though they are never seen in the film as do whole alleyways and side streets of the picture’s main set. However, the results of this can’t be argued with as the film which came out on the other end has sets and attention to detail which are a marvel to behold, while the 3 hour run time never drags with the episodic nature of the picture working a treat and never comes off as disjointed. More infamously the production of Red Beard caused a rift between Kurosawa and Mifune and while one can only wonder about what future films the duo could have gone on to make, Red Beard is as fine as swan song as one can go out on.

Toshiro Mifune was never better in the role of Dr. Kyojō Niide, aka Red Beard (although with the movie being black & white we never see the red in this glorious beard of his). There is a weight and a larger than life dominance that Mifune brings that is key to the role. He looks so impressive, imposing, dominant, rigid, and wild that it forces the viewer to confront his combination of humanitarianism and toughness. The nature of the material in Red Beard puts the movie at risk of falling into the cheesy, but Mifune in part prevents this from being the case. I find Red Beard’s personality doesn’t match the negative terms he is described by from an intern at the beginning of the film with phrases including stubborn, inconsiderate, drastic, proud as-well-as a dictator. Especially considering the manner in which his new intern Dr. Noboru Yasumoto doesn’t play ball at first, the world-weary mentor remains remarkably calm and patient. Red Beard is a character who shows how being tough, hardheaded and willful (even deceitful) is sometimes necessary to get humanitarian work done. The film even provides Mifune with a slice of action which would normally be reserved for Kurosawa’s samurai films as Red Beard takes on a group of men at a brothel in order to rescue a sick girl. With ease (albeit believably) he takes out each man one by one, breaking many an arm and leg in the process. Being a doctor however, he immediately disowns his actions. Still, badass Toshiro is badass.

Red Beard runs (or rules some might say) a non-profit, government-funded health facility run known as the Koshikawa Clinic. On a technical note, why is the facility classified as a clinic as opposed to a hospital since it is a rather large venue, running round-the-clock complete with wards full of patients staying overnight? – But I digress. One fascinating aspect of the clinic is the lack of consistency when it comes to sanitary standards as viewed from a modern perspective. In by far the most graphic scene in the film (or any Kurosawa film for that matter), a woman is being operated on while conscious, being tied to the operating table and blindfolded, yet the men operating on her wear no gloves or face coverings. However, conversely earlier in the film it is clearly pointed out that the clinic does not allow tatami mats as they gather dirt and moisture. Furthermore, in one scene Red Beard speaks of the issue of poverty stating “But for poverty, half these people wouldn’t be ill”, however his comments on the situation in relation to politics are rather simplistic (“If poverty’s a political problem, what has politics ever done for the poor?”, “Has a law been passed to abolish poverty and ignorance?”). Granted Red Beard is set in the mid-19th century, so one can forgive his naivety in thinking governments can solve such problems as the 20th century would show.

Dr. Noboru Yasumoto (Yūzō Kayama) is a post-graduate medical student who has been assigned to the Koshikawa Clinic against his will. The prima donna has studied to become the Shogun’s personal doctor rather than working in some down-and-out clinic, thus during his initial stay, he lounges and refuses to do any work in hopes Red Beard will just tell him to leave. However, he comes to learn just how much of a doctor he really is by a series of incidents. In one scene he is left shaken after being instructed to stay by a dying man’s side and right afterwards faints after witnessing the sight of intestines being shoved back into a woman during a surgery. Its clear Dr. Yasumoto is book smart but not street smart, however more significantly, he has become a doctor for the prestige rather than out of humanitarianism, displaying selfishness in a job that is supposed to be as selfless as possible. His eventual choice of staying with the clinic rather than becoming the Shogun’s doctor is one of many aspects which would have made Red Beard a corny film in lesser hands.

If there’s one cinematic image from Red Beard to be burned into your memory it’s that of the mentally ill girl known as The Mantis (Kyōko Kagawa) and her haunting encounter with Dr. Yasumoto after she escapes from her quarters. In another display of Dr. Yasumoto’s naivety and inexperience, she delivers a harrowing monologue in which she claims she is not mentally ill and having been sexually abused by various men in the past. Dr. Yasumoto gets suckered in by this projected innocence and vulnerability despite him previously being told that she has killed 3 clerks with a hairpin. Perhaps one could cut Dr. Yasumoto some slack for falling under the spell of The Mantis as she doesn’t meet the stereotype of a mentally ill person – she is young, beautiful, seductive and still manages to dress like a maiko. However, this perception is undone as the look on her face turns to that of pure menace and she tries to stab Dr. Yasumoto with a hairpin while being sexually aroused at the same time (“The female eats the male after mating”).What’s so visually striking about the scene is the lighting and shadows created by a single candle while the sequence contains within it an unbroken shot that lasts 6 minutes and 10 seconds. The other great subplot within Red Beard is a 17-minute detour in which a dying man named Sahachi (Tsutomu Yamazaki) tells the story of how his wife’s remains came to be buried outside his house. The romantic and haunting tragedy is very much a Japanese one, with love being interrupted by an earthquake and concluding with the wife committing harakiri. This detour has no real impact on the rest of the film but to remove it would be such a loss to the film.

Red Beard represents the triumph of the human spirit as we watch the stress and the strain put under the workers of the clinic. Above all, Red Beard is one of the best cinematic representations of the golden rule – “treat others as you want to be treated”, which is best exemplified through the character of Otoyo (Terumi Niki). After the 12-year-old girl is rescued from a brothel after years of abuse, Dr. Yasumoto treats her with kindness and dignity which she has never experience before. After Dr. Yasumoto himself falls ill, she returns the favour and nurtures him back to health. Likewise, in one scene the Madame of the brothel (played by the always fabulous Haruko Sugimura) comes to the clinic to take Otoyo back to the brothel, the other women employed at the clinic prevent the Madame from doing so in a heartwarming moment of defiance in which they show how Otoyo has become one of the group. However, more significantly is the relationship Otoyo shares with the young boy Chôji (Yoshitaka Zushi), a thief who has been stealing gruel from the clinic. Rather than just chastising him for his thievery, through mutual understanding Otoyo manages to convince Chôji to stop stealing food in one of the film’s most wholesome and moving lengthy exchanges of dialogue.

I re-watched Red Beard on a windy day in which it was bucketing rain, and honestly, it just matched the atmosphere of the film perfectly. Red Beard is a very meditative, calm and tranquil film to watch (let me ask has snow ever looked more beautiful on celluloid?). Within all the human suffering, poverty, abuse and death, there still comes a film in which the three transcendental shine through – Goodness, Truth & Beauty.

Drunken Angel [醉いどれ天使/Yoidore Tenshi] (1948)

Drain The Swamp

***This Review Contains Spoilers***

Drunken Angel marks the beginning of Akira Kurosawa’s golden age in the first of the 16 film collaboration with Toshiro Mifune (6th out of a whopping 21 films with Takashi Shimura). Drunken Angel is a movie thick with atmosphere, set in a slum with worn out buildings in which a lone guitar player comes out at night overlooking a toxic bog (possibly created from a bomb crater) laden with prostitutes next to a medical practice – a metaphor for all that was rotten about life in the wake of Japan’s catastrophic wartime defeat. You can almost feel the heat and humidity come off the screen while during the film’s daytime scenes the city comes alive with the diegetic music echoing in the background. No city is mentioned by name but a sign in the background of one scene reads in English “Social Center Of Tokyo”.

The chemistry between Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura is electric – The chemistry between Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura is electric – watching the two interact in the film’s opening scene they could easily carry the entire picture by themselves. A very youthful, handsome and suave Mifune is Matsunaga, a big shot member of the Yakuza (although the word is never mentioned in the film). With athletic agility, cat-like moves and his fashion choices of striped shirts and zoot suits, I do get some George Raft vibes from his performance. He shares a fascinating relationship with the brash, ill-tempered but dedicated Dr Sanada (Shimura) as he attempts to cure him of tuberculosis. The two hesitantly develop mutual respect for each other (Matsunaga reminds Sanada of himself during his youth as he states at one point) despite their highly tumultuous, sometimes violent interactions. In Drunken Angel Kurosawa doesn’t want to glamorize the Yakuza, but rather expose them as a blight on Japanese society. 

Drunken Angel is a classic story of addiction, in which “just one more drink” turns into a night of binging as Matsunaga drinks himself to death. The fantasy dream sequence involving Matsunaga opening a coffin on the beach only to find himself inside feels like something from a silent horror movie and is even quite Bergman-esque. It also feels reminiscent of the scene in The Empire Strikes Back in which Luke Skywalker finds his own face within Darth Vader’s helmet. The climax of Drunken Angel on the other hand features the type of cinematic images that you never forget as a weak and ill Matsunaga tries to fight his boss Okada as the two are covered in paint and scrambling on the ground before Mutsunga is stabbed and collapses by a balcony – it feels reminiscent of the iconic endings in various Warner Bros gangster films. Had this been a Hollywood production I can easily see it being a vehicle for James Cagney and Pat O’Brien, with perhaps Bogart as Okada?

It’s fascinating to see how much western trends are embraced in Japan, something which is often surprise to newcomers of Japanese film (I do love the interior of the dance hall with the giant playing cards on the walls as well as the Bolero Club with its Iberian ascetics and music). Yet at its heart Drunken Angel remains a story of post-war Japan with its characters and setting being an allegory using illness and contamination as a metaphor for the state of the nation. Matsunaga can be seen as a symbol of the Japan of yesteryear, struggling to find relevance in this new world while Sanada is a broken Japan trying to forge ahead. Sanda’s assistant Miyo (Chieko Nakakita) refuses to let go of her gangster, ex-boyfriend who ruined her life – a Japan which is pinning for what has been lost. However it is the young schoolgirl (Yoshiko Kuga) of whom Dr Sanda cures of tuberculosis provides the film with an optimistic, wholesome ending -a sign of Japan yet to come.