Drunken Angel (1948)
Drunken Angel is one of the most important of Kurosawa's films for several reasons.
1. It was the first film that Kurosawa had complete control over. From start to finish, Kurosawa, not the studio, was calling the shots.
2. It was the first film that Kurosawa would work with film composer Fumio Hayasaka. Hayasaka would work on all of Kurosawa's ensuing films, until his death in 1955.
3. Perhaps most important of all, this was the first Kurosawa film to feature Toshiro Mifune.
Toshiro Mifune is arguably Japan's most famous actor if not of all time then certainly of the period between 1950-1980.
It is somewhat ironic that Mifune would come to be Japan's most well known and respected actors, given he never wanted to be an actor in the first place, and he didn't set foot on Japanese soil until he was 19. Mifune was born in Qingdao, China in April of 1920. His Japanese parents lived in the Japanese occupied town of Dalian, making Mifune a Japanese citizen. He worked in his father's photography shop until he was drafted into the Japanese military.
Also, these remarks by Dan Schneider on Donal Richie's "Commentary" portion on the Criterion DVD--where they run the movie while Richie descibes, analyzes and comments on what is going on inthe different scenes, etc.:
Donald Richie feels that Drunken Angel is a bit preachy, when this truly isn't the case. Dr. Sanada may be didactic, but the film is not. Instead, Drunken Angel is rather impassive toward its characters.
On the other hand, Kurosawa's film does have some flaws, such as reveling in American gangster clichés - something that Richie does not expound upon. He does pick up on something that I noticed right away, that Drunken Angel is set in the summer, but was filmed in January - that's why characters are seen in light wear, whereas their breath is visible.
But then again, Richie errs when he claims that Sanada and Matsunaga are opposite sides of the same coin, for they're clearly not. Sharing some similarities does not make a pair of individuals part of the same coin. The two men have differing temperaments, philosophies, habits, and goals. Overall, though, the commentary offers a perfectly acceptable performance by Richie.
The same can be said about Drunken Angel. It has obvious flaws - the worst of them being a dream sequence where the consumptive Matsunaga emerges from a casket to chase himself on a shoreline. (This was done better a decade later in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, and over three decades later in Kurosawa's own Kagemusha.) On the other hand, Drunken Angel also features deft uses of symbolism, both visual and musical, and those overcome the film's occasional fall into gangster clichés.
Kurosawa himself felt that Drunken Angel was his first 'real' film, the first unencumbered by interference from outside sources. Thus, Drunken Angel is like its creator: something aborning.
(Dan Schneider)
From Another Review, NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9406EED6103CE63BBC4950DFB4678382649EDE
Even though this symbolic melodrama was made more than ten years ago, before the production of Mr. Kurosawa's historic "Rashomon," it reveals the director's devotion to a strong philosophic point of view and his determined, experimental groping for a firm cinematic style. It also features two fine actors who were prominent in "Rashmon"—Toshiro Mifune, who played the bandit, and Takashi Shimura, the woodgatherer.
Substantially, this is a story of a Japanese physician in an area of dives and slums and a sullen young gangster with tuberculosis whom the doctor volunteers to try to cure. But as the drama develops in a brooding and brutish mood and competition for control of the consumptive hoodlum is injected by a gang boss just out of jail, the symbolic significance of the conflict emerges artfully. The doctor is a brusque but good Samaritan trying to correct evil and corruption in a wicked world.
At first, the designs of the director appear superficial and contrived, as he roams around puddles of stagnant water and picks up the vagrant strains of a sad guitar. These seem to have no more valid purpose than to trickle a melancholy mood into the brawls of the drunken physician and the frightened and resentful goon.
But then Mr. Kurosawa's pacing, his constructions of garish images and his carefully balanced creation of a partly wistful, partly poisonous atmosphere alert the complacent viewer to an awareness that his is a world of more than healer and hoodlum, girls and gangsters. His is an environment of disease, where the fateful bacilli of corruption lurk in every dancehall and gambling dive—puddles of social consumption—to be battled by the weak power of man's will.
There are crude, derivative techniques in the compound. Some of Mr. Kurosawa's images smack of American gangster clichés, such as a cacaphonous nightclub bit, and there's one dream sequence, showing the consumptive being chased by his own ghost, that is pure stunt. Apparently the director was trying a little bit of everything.
But on the whole his imagery is forceful: A tinkling music-box opened in a room where a fickle dancehall hostess is trying to sneak out while her lover lies ill in bed; a violent death-wrestle of two combatants in a puddle of spilled white paint; a doll, lying tarnished and sodden, in a noxious pool. Mr. Kurosawa's liberal use of graphics is exceptional in a film from the Orient.
So is his striking use of close-ups, his effective compositions with heads, not surpassed in any Japanese picture except his own "Rashomon." It is in such shots that he is able to expose most vividly his mordant characters—Mr. Mifune as the young gangster and Mr. Shimura as the physician, the "drunken angel." From each he exacts volcanic and tortured performances. The passions that stir in their contestants are brought forth for everyone to see.
Michiyo Kogure as the dancehall hostess, Reizaburo Yamamoto as the gang boss and Chieko Nakakita as the physician's mistress are colorful and credible, too. The musical score is affecting and the English subtitles convey an idea of what is being spoken in Japanese, despite some bizarre punctuation with countless question marks.
The Cast
DRUNKEN ANGEL. Screen play by Keinosuke Uegusa and Akira Kurosawa; directed by Mr. Kurosawa; produced by Toho and presented by Brandon Films, Inc.
Running time: 102 minutes.
Matsunaga . . . . . Toshiro Mifune
Dr. Sanada . . . . . Takashi Shimura
Okada . . . . . Reizaburo Yamamoto
Nanae . . . . . Michiyo Kogure
Miyo . . . . . Chieko Nakakita
Gin . . . . . Noriko Sengoku
Maidservant . . . Choko Iida