Why you watch: Drunken Angel (1948)
Akira Kurosawa’s early classic reimagines the crime flick into a stylish meditation of what real virtue might be.
DRUNKEN ANGEL is remembered primarily for its firsts: the first time Kurosawa worked with his frequent star, Toshiro Mifune, and the first picture Kurosawa felt was truly his own, even if it was his seventh. There’s a whole school of film criticism that looks at a director’s early works only calling out techniques and interests, without investigating how the pictures work beyond their role as rough drafts to those later, “inevitable” masterpieces.
And DRUNKEN ANGEL deserves better. Its story structure still feels radical today, and its view of how virtue operates in the real world couldn’t be more relevant when the appearance of “being good” can be mighty profitable, provided it’s sufficiently entertaining and cruel. Kurosawa and the screenwriter Keinosuke Uekusa, understand that doing good is inherently frustrating and often futile, and more importantly, that saints are still stubbornly human.
The title character is an alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) working in the slums of Tokyo, and the movie initially concerns his attempt to cure a local yakuza big shot (Mifune) of his rapidly advancing tuberculosis. It begins at night, with the melancholy purr of a street guitarist and a view of a polluted bog in the center of that slum, instantly establishing the contrast of beauty and decay.
Mifune storms into the doctor’s home to get a bullet removed from his hand, but Shimura can tell the gangster has all the symptoms of TB. But Mifune only wants to get bandaged and be on his way. Shimura mocks and derides him for his criminal ways, and notes how his bravado is only hiding his real fears about that cough. Mifune storms out, and we follow Shimura as he cajoles Mifune into treatment, all the while trying to score a free drink every chance he gets. And when he comes up short, he’s happy to mix his own drinks from his medical supplies.
Shimura is constantly yelling and losing his patience, and yet he won’t let Mifune ignore his condition, pressing him to get an X-ray from a doctor rich enough to have a machine. Shimura sees himself in the younger Mifune, having been a drunk womanizer in his own youth. He blames his own vices for his being stuck in a sad office on the wrong side of tracks. Yet, we can’t picture him leaving his patients behind, even if he could. He’s too observant of his neighborhood and too willing to open his door for the most desperate among them, even giving a job and a room to a woman (Chieko Nakakita) when she leaves her yakuza boyfriend.
It rolls along as a traditional character study, as he vacillates between caring for Mifune and throwing him out for failing to follow his orders. One of the best running gags of the movie is how often Shimura shouts that he’s given up on someone forever, only to quietly open his door to them as soon as they return. Shimura understands that TB is only one illness afflicting Mifune; the yakuza is the other. Unless he goes straight, the TB isn’t going anywhere.
Then at the 45-minute mark, the movie shifts its focus to follow Mifune instead. His old boss (Reizaburô Yamamoto) gets out of prison, and Yamamoto's first act is to literally take the guitar away from that street performer that opens the movie, and play his own song, as of to restart the movie. From here we get a more traditional gangster plot, as Mifune plays loyal foot soldier to his old boss, wondering how much of his old territory Yamamoto wants back.
By now, the newbie screenwriter will pull their hair out because the movie largely ignores its title character for almost thirty minutes, shifting to a character study of Mifune. But the movie is able to do this because it retains the focus on the problem of the story, namely, Mifune’s illness. And as he falls back into his yakuza lifestyle, his condition deteriorates further from long nights, constantly drinking and smoking to keep up his gangster pals.
So why waste all that time with Shimura? Why not begin with Mifune? In one sense, the story does, by opening on Mifune’s initial visit to Shimura. But by spending so much time with the “good” doctor, we see the yakuza lifestyle from the outside in, so when we actually step inside that world, we’re seeing it through Shimura’s critical view of it.
In one of the two great set pieces of the movie, Kurosawa stages a night club scene as a horror show, lighting the torch singer like a movie monster, deep in shadow with harsh swaths of direct light, which makes her flirty singing seem malevolent. The musical number is high energy and garish, written as it was to mock the clichés of American jazz. The yakuza are all dressed in Western-style suits as well, casting them as corrupted by American culture.
Kurosawa couldn’t make these critiques overt since the movie was made during our postwar occupation of Japan, and was subject to American censors. And like any other censor, these Americans were oblivious to anything but the text, letting Kurosawa’s disapproval be felt, only because it wasn’t announced.
By starting with Shimura’s point of view, we see the gangsters’ moral rot in the context of the entire neighborhood. Scorsese achieves his critiques of the gangster mentality from intimacy, living within that world exclusively, so we understand the appeal and eventually its hypocrisy, and with THE IRISHMAN, its banality as well. Kurosawa achieves the same, but with the distance from it that Shimura’s point of view provides.
Eventually, Mifune’s yakuza life collides with the good doctor again, as that old boss comes looking for his ex-girlfriend, who works at Shimura’s clinic. Yamamoto wants her back, but the doctor refuses to let the gangster see her. He argues it’s a new world and her choice matters. But this refusal will be a death sentence for Shimura, so Mifune intercedes. He’ll ask Yamamoto’s boss to spare the doctor’s life. Mifune’s own loyal service should be enough to convince the big boss to protect Shimura.
Of course, he soon learns that such codes never impede a gangster’s appetites, and is forced to kill Yamamoto to protect Shimura, even as his TB strangles what life he has left. This culminates in a world-class tussle between them in an unfinished hallway, drenched in blood and paint. The blunt, erratic violence is so deliriously stylized it feels like the inspiration for everyone from Sam Fuller to the John Wick franchise. Neither Mifune nor Yamamoto survives the battle, but Shimura, and the woman he defends, will be left alone.
The movie ends with Shimura unaware that Mifune died trying to protect him. He sees Mifune’s death as simply proof that he couldn’t escape his yakuza temptations. And again, we see the value of splitting the movie’s POV between the two, when by the end, both become worthy of being the movie’s titular character.
The omniscience allows the audience to see both men’s bias… and grace. It also gives the movie room to interrogate the system they inhabit. Douglas Ritchie, a leading Kurosawa scholar, explains that the director was always telling stories where “no single person is as good as the world is bad.” By offering both character studies in a single film, they’re allowed to comment on one another as mirror images, without losing any of the emotional intimacy that only comes from spending so much time with each of them.
DRUNKEN ANGEL, and in fact, most of Kurosawa’s best movies, were searching for a new value system in the wake of Japan’s defeat in WWII. He was looking to rediscover a way to take pride in his country, even as the military loss revealed the limits of its warped nationalism. While his own country dismissed him as too Western, he was only seeking new ways to reinvigorate his own culture. He credits Dostoevsky for the inspiration for this picture, and his love of Shakespeare didn’t stop him from transforming the old Bard’s plays into feudal dramas set in Japan’s past. His work became universal precisely because he made it so specific to his own home.
And while this closely reflects the life of postwar Tokyo, the dueling “drunken angels” transcends its genre roots and becomes a tribute to unheralded nobility. Witness any single moment from their lives, and Shimura could be discarded as a drunk crank, and Mifune as an ill-tempered thug, but watching the full breadth of their suffering and decisions, we understand that they are both angelic. Their rage comes from their own inability to live up to their values, and the world’s willingness to reward people who don’t even try.
Shimura doesn’t clean up the neighborhood or even save Mifune. He’s aware that while he might cure a patient from TB, the neighborhood is plagued by both human nature and systemic corruption. And he doesn’t have a solution for either of those ills, even if they make his job almost impossible. It’s no different than the American public school teacher who discovers they can’t solve every problem a student brings into a classroom, even though society expects them to do exactly that. That doesn’t stop most teachers from trying, which leaves people doing this kind of work, tired, frustrated, and cynical.
But in this modern era, there’s a tendency to attack the do-gooders first and foremost. Our culture accepts evil as a given, so it spends a lot more energy interrogating anyone trying to make a difference, as if the downtrodden have so many allies, we can pick and choose only the best to speak or lend a hand.
DRUNKEN ANGEL is a compelling reminder that “helpers” as Mr. Rogers referred to them, don’t always look or act in ways we like. They don’t tell us what we want to hear, in a way we want to hear it. They have their blind spots and flaws. They are, by their very nature, pains in the ass, because they aren’t trying to sell us anything. Instead, they’re trying to get us to do the hard but necessary things that might save us. And they are relentless in their effort, as any number of characters here keep trying to do the right thing over and over again, despite their exhaustion or failures.
Shimura may view his effort here as a failure, but the audience knows better. We know Shimura’s grumpy, relentless faith in Mifune ended up moving that gangster to his first truly noble act, one that saved the doctor and his assistant in the end. Shimura might have wanted to cure his patient’s TB, but he did something much difficult. He healed him.
DRUNKEN ANGEL is currently streaming on the Criterion channel and available for rent elsewhere.
Why You Watch is a weekly series looking at forgotten, rarely seen, or underrated movies for what they can teach about the filmmaking craft and culture. Show some love with a clap or two to this piece, by sharing it, or follow me here or on Twitter, @arthousepunch. And of course, let me know what you think about DRUNKEN ANGEL in the comments.
