DRUNKEN ANGEL
(directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1948)
****+ (out of 5)
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> Akira Kurosawa made 30 films in his storied career. In over half of them, he worked with talented actor Toshiro Mifune- a very fruitful collaboration that began with this excellent black-and-white film.
. DRUNKEN ANGEL is the story of a clash of traditions, between a Yakuza gangster and an alcoholic doctor, disgusted by what has happened to his country in the wake of World War II. This flick was made during the allied occupation of Japan that followed surrender. It lasted two-and-a-half years, during which Japanese films were heavily censored. Kurosawa had a hell of a time getting this film made the way he envisioned it, but he persisted, and the finished product pleased audiences, censors and the director himself, who felt that with this film, he had finally found his authentic voice.
. The film was shot on a repurposed set- the largest outdoor set ever built in Japan to that point. He made one major change- adding a filthy, stinking, polluted lagoon, choked with trash and bubbling with methane, that stood as a symbol of the mess his country was in, and almost became a character unto itself.
. Kurosawa worked with a stable of character actors who become familiar faces over time. They are all so very good here. It is just a treat to watch them at work. Mifune plays a swaggering, self-destructive gangster with TB- another symbol of the rot of Japan in the wake of their ignominious defeat. Takashi Shimura is wonderful as the ornery doctor, who feels compelled to fulfill his Hippocratic oath and treat the Yakuza despite his hatred of the culture of organized crime whose code of honor his reluctant patient upholds. There’s so much going on here, toned down to escape the attention of meddlesome censors, but still potent. It’s an opaque but effective indictment of the postwar occupation and of the Japanese macho culture that kept feudalism going on long after the world had moved on.
– Dynamite! What a filmmaker!
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