Drunken Angel [1948] [DVD]

This early film is where Kurosawa really finds his style, Mifune is electic as the arrogant TB infected young Yakuza, determined to ignore his illness and rule his patch. Shimiru is the Drunken angel of the title, a good hearted but alcoholic doctor with a hatred for germs and thuggery,who tries to help Mifune. I think this film should have the same status as Rashomon, a seamless work of art with passion and forboding. The gangster films of Coppola and scorcese owe a lot to this work.

How do you choose to live? Dr. Sanada (Takashi Shimura), a drunk who has made some poor choices, has chosen brusque hope over despair. Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune) is a tough, handsome yakuza making his choices, too, and it turns out he is afraid of hope.

Sanada, a rough-tongued drunk, is a doctor whose patients are as poor as the Tokyo slum they all live in. He tries as best he can to deal with tuberculosis, which is insidious and deadly. A 17-year-old schoolgirl just may survive because of him. When Matsunaga shows up at Sanada's tiny office with a bullet wound in his hand, Sanada fixes him up and immediately suspects Matsunaga has tuberculosis. That's not a good thing for a yakuza, especially a man like Matsunaga. "That girl who just left has more guts than you'll ever have," Sanada shouts at Matsunaga. "She's looking her illness straight in the eye. You don't have a fraction of her guts. You're still scared of the dark." It gets worse. Sanada eventually persuades Matsunaga to begin treatment. When Matsunaga's old gang boss, a vindictive and cruel man, gets out of prison and takes over again, Matsunaga is drawn back to his earlier choices. As Matsunaga's illness worsens, he's isolated and humiliated, yet the relationship deepens between the young, sick yakuza and the older, wiser doctor,

What does Sanada see in the tough, violent and frightened-of-death Matsunaga...a son there never was?...himself making mistakes when he was younger?...a vulnerable human being who, whatever his crimes and attitudes, requires help?...or just a man he might somehow convince to fight against the odds? "It's not just his lungs that are bad," says Sanada. "It's like he's sick to the core. He acts tough and swaggers around, but in his heart I know he's unbearably lonely. He still has a conscience tormenting him. His heart hasn't frozen over with evil just yet." Sanada is a man who refuses to live life without hope. He can become angry when others try to. Well, Kurosawa is nothing if he isn't a director who deals with big themes. There's quite a bit of emotion that Kurosawa draws forth, and he's fortunate in having two fine actors with which to demonstrate those themes. Takashi Shimura is the heart of the movie. Toshiro Mifune, looking thin, provides the soul that Shimura's Dr. Sanada is fighting for. Drunken Angel, for all the existential humanism (as one critic pompously characterized the movie), ends on a hopeful note: That 17-year-old schoolgirl, a wager won and a piece of candy.

No director always scores 100 per cent with their movies. Kurosawa is no exception. Drunken Angel is heavy handed with the symbolism. The opening music announces with a dirge that this is a serious drama with a capital "S." There are frequent cutaways to close-ups of scum-filled puddles when Kurosawa wants to emphasize a point. There's a nighttime guitar player. For those who may know little of Kurosawa, the English title," Drunken Angel" sounds like it might be a Thirties MGM melodrama with Joan Crawford. It's an awkward title. Still, Drunken Angel is a movie worth seeing. I doubt you'll be unmoved by it.

The Criterion release looks very good. I didn't listen to the commentary, but it's by Donald Richie, the highly respected scholar of Japanese film. There are two extras about Kurosawa.

To see Takashi Shimura at his very best, watch him in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Ikiru. For those interested in lonely Japanese doctors who serve their patients selflessly and with hope, this time fighting hepatitis just before the end of WWII, you might enjoy Dr. Akagi.

Considered by many to be Kurosawa's first film (actually his eighth) of real note, I watched it as part of the newly released BFI Kurosawa Crime Collection.

I found it more accessible and initially enjoyable than his later and more well known samurai classics, probably because it could have been directed by Howard Hawkes or any number of leading crime flick directors of the period. With Toshiro Mifune (in his first of many Kurosawa roles) dressed in sharp suits and slicked back hair, he looks every part a Chicago gangster. Jazz bands play in bars, with western style dancing.

Takeshi Shimura (another Kurosawa regular) plays the drunk doc, who despairs at the slums around him and the typhoid-infested pond that everything is dumped into that is on his doorstep. He takes a bullet from the younger man and then treats his TB. As both men lurch unsteadily from their respective curses (Mifune soon looking very haggard and unwell) and the two men form an uneasy alliance. Then the yakuza's plot is taken away from him, due to his ailing health.

Drunken Angel displays not only a sharp snapshot on post-war Japan and western influences but nuanced and fine performances and a great story of two very different men, who find maybe that the differences aren't so great, after all.