The Fever Film Club #2, #3
Drunken Angel (1948)
Red Beard (1965)
100 Movies You Should See Before We All Die
Happy 100th Birthday, Toshirô Mifune
This club convenes remotely as a public service while social distancing.
On April 1, TCM celebrated Toshirô Mifune’s 100th birthday by showcasing ten of the sixteen collaborations, all of them cinematic masterpieces, between the actor and the great director Akira Kurosawa. And wouldn’t you know it, the first and the last films they made together speak directly to our present situation. They’re stories about doctors. The same kind of doctors we see profiled on TV every day, risking their lives in a seemingly overwhelming struggle against death and disease: their patients’ and their own; going to work every day under unimaginably difficult and dangerous conditions. Selfless. Courageous. Noble. Exhausted.
Those four words apply to the vastly different doctors in Drunken Angel (1948), which takes place in post-war Tokyo, in a pestilent slum, rife with crime and disease; and in Red Beard (1965), set in 19th Century Edo (later Tokyo) at a clinic that services the medical needs of the poor.
In Drunken Angel, Takashi Shimura is Sanada, an alcoholic resident of a Tokyo slum, who also happens to be a physician, and an expert in the treatment of tuberculosis. Toshirô Mifune is Matsunaga, a Yakuza who visits doctors like Sanada when he needs to have the odd stray bullet removed discreetly. When Dr. Sanada tells Matsunaga he’s got a tubercular hole in his lung, and that he’d better go get an x-ray, the Yakuza physically attacks the doctor, who fends him off by throwing glass vessels at his head. This was Mifune’s first starring role, and he is said by film historians to have here established the quintessential screen image of the Yakuza for all subsequent Japanese Yakuza movies, much as his later performances set the standard for the screen samurai. Although violent, Mifune’s Matsunaga is, for most of the movie, a less-threatening figure than a samurai. I can’t imagine getting rid of a samurai just by throwing things at his head.
Dr. Sanada is a drunk with no patience, no bedside manner, and not an iota of sentimentality. He lives and works in a filthy neighborhood dominated by a swamp that is a bubbling, festering stew of cholera. Surrounded by poverty, he devotes all the energy he has left after drinking alcohol to fighting the diseases of the poor. He appears at first to be an unsympathetic character because he is perpetually cranky, maybe because he risks his safety and his health for the sake of the safety and the health of his impoverished patients. Even the patient who occasionally beats him up realizes in the end that this antisocial doctor is, in fact, a great man.
And yet, there is a latent tenderness under Dr. Sanada’s gruff behavior. It’s as though the only thing he recognizes in his patients is their illness, and everything he does, how he behaves, is directed towards the disease he is driven to eradicate. When confronted with a tubercular hole in a Yakuza’s lung, he is willing to meet violence with violence, as if it’s integral to the treatment plan, to force his patient to understand that he might actually make him well again. When treating a young schoolgirl’s tuberculosis, he behaves like a stern schoolmaster, the kind who pushes his students to achievements beyond their confidence in their own abilities, and rewards them when they surpass expectations. His nurse is a former sex worker who lives in fear of a Yakuza from her past; is Sanada’s protectiveness towards her a function of a tender heart, or of her utility in helping him fight disease?
By the end of the film, we might want to attribute Dr. Sanada’s actions to tenderness, but in the face of tragedy he remains unsentimental, immune to the emotional pitfalls that are part of his profession. Joy is represented by the schoolgirl whom he cures; grief by the nurse who mourns Matsunaga, the hardened Yakuza whose humanity is awakened by Sanada’s single-minded crusade to cure him of disease. Sanada remains as we first saw him: selfless, courageous, noble, exhausted. Drunk.
Drunken Angel established Kurosawa as an important filmmaker in Japan, just as Rashomon winning the The Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival made him an international figure. All at once, the rest of the world was alerted to the brilliance of Japanese cinema, including the work of his colleagues, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu. This in turn opened the door of international distribution to younger directors like Kon Ichikawa and Nagisa Oshima. And Toshirô Mifune began the most celebrated and productive career of any internationally-known Japanese film actor.
Red Beard marked the end of the Kurosawa-Mifune collaboration. It’s thought that the excessive year-long shooting schedule adversely affected Mifune’s finances, and created a rift. The tone and style of the film is “later Kurosawa,” by which I mean the gritty realism of Drunken Angel has been replaced by a smoother, more refined realism. It helps to know that the recreation of a 19th Century medical clinic in Red Beard is authentic down to the type of wood used in the construction of the sets.
A privileged young doctor, Noboru Yasumoto (Yûzô Kayama), trained in Dutch medicine in Nagasaki, expects to be assigned to the medical retinue of the Shogun. Instead, he is sent to the clinic of Dr. Kyojô Niide (Toshirô Mifune), known as Red Beard, because, well, he has a big reddish beard. Yasumoto considers it an insult to be assigned to a clinic whose patients are the unhealthy indigent. Red Beard runs a tight, clean clinic, has rules everyone follows, and is feared, beloved and respected by patients, nurses and doctors alike. Yasumoto rebels; refuses to wear the clinic’s uniform; refuses to follow the rules; suspects that Red Beard’s interest in his notes from medical school are merely an attempt to steal his ideas. But instead of Yasumoto being treated as a rebel or an outcast, everyone, including the stern, businesslike Red Beard, treats him respectfully, staying pretty much out of his way until his inevitable transformation through genuine hardship into one of Red Beard’s permanent disciples. When the time comes for him to leave and join the exalted realm of the Shogun, he stays to treat the poor.
The various events that transform Yasumoto make for a long (185 minutes), wonderful movie. What makes it especially interesting today is its direct attention to the same issues we face now: poverty, government neglect of the health and welfare of the poor, and the need for human solidarity.
Strange how seemingly unrelated things (The Pandemic and Kurosawa) may appear to converge when our attention is at one and the same time minutely focused and broadly expanded. Minutely focused on sheer survival: our own health, that of our friends, our loved ones, a focus shared by populations all over the world. Broadly expanded on the vital question of whether the present scourge might provide an impetus to overhaul society in a way that will trigger a movement towards egalitarianism and democracy, and towards sustaining the Earth as a home for humanity.
It’s an inopportune time for us to be required to exercise that most useful of difficult personal qualities, optimism of the will, but it’s also absolutely necessary. And there is no better catalyst for optimism than the artistry of that superb observer of humanity, Kurosawa, whose films put indefatigable inner strength and courage front and center alongside weakness and despair. The same Kurosawa who was able to create a perfect work of cinema, Seven Samurai (1954), a film bursting with optimism, was also driven to despair following a period of creative failure, and attempted suicide in 1971, the ultimate expression of hopelessness.
Drunken Angel was released within three years of the detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other films, Kurosawa dealt more directly with the anxiety caused by those events, but they hang like a pall over the dirt, the despair and the violence of this film. Similarly, although set in 19th Century Japan, Red Beard deals with government neglect of the poor that is recognizable in our present lives. And the idea of selfless dedication to healing, treated as a devotion beneath the dignity of most people until they find themselves in need, resonates today. What we do as a people now, during this pandemic, will determine whether humanity can manage the kinds of radical changes required to make life livable for everyone, not just the lucky few. Compared with the challenges of 19th Century illness and poverty; compared with the despair and anxiety that followed the incomprehensible use of atomic weapons against a civilian population; what we face today is a choice between mass survival, or mass chaos. We’re learning from doctors that if we ignore our common humanity and refuse to take whatever action is necessary to ensure a peaceful, prosperous, egalitarian world, we may be witnessing an irreversible breakdown from which we may not recover.
Fortunately, we are surrounded by people like drunken Dr. Sanada and Red Beard, who refuse to accept human suffering as inevitable.
Watching this movie on a small laptop computer is disrespectful to cinema. Phones are out of the question. Hyperlinks appear below.
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How to watch the movies:
justwatch.com Drunken Angel; Stream, Rent, Buy, watch here, watch now
justwatch.com Red Beard; Stream, Rent, Buy, watch here, watch now
criterion — Drunken Angel
criterion — Red Beard
Find out about the movies:
IMDB — Drunken Angel
Wikipedia — Drunken Angel
IMDB — Red Beard
Wikipedia — Red Beard
Find out about Toshirô Mifune
IMDB
Wikipedia
Find out about Akira Kurosawa
IMDB
Wikipedia
Watch favorite scenes:
youtube — Drunken Angel
youtube — Red Beard
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