Review of Drunken Angel (1948) by Levi P — 14 Jan 2011

Kurosawa reaching his peak. What can you say. Brilliant. Endlessly complex: everything in this film counts, every single moment, every single shot.

The first time Toshiro Mifune and Kurosawa worked together, what would be a long history of films made together, and Mifune is so raw and brilliant here, he almost steals the show.

A classic story, the 'drunken angel' here is an aging alcoholic doctor, played by Shimura, who is obsessed with helping his patients but also rages against their failures as a kind of stand-in for his own failures. He pulls himself together just barely enough to try to help a young gangster played by Mifune. Mifune has a good heart, but is caught up in the modernizing Japan and the gangster world of booze and women and money. As he comes down with TB, the story revolves around the fights and love between Mifune and Shimura as the doctor latches on to Mifune as a kind of mirror of himself: a good but flawed and failing man. And also for the quality booze. The story becomes more complex as Simura's nurse/assistant is a girl who previously was girlfriends with an imprisoned gangster, and she sort of escaped from the gangster world. That aging gangster gets out of prison and returns, essentially replacing Mifune, who was the local boss, and taking over again. Mifune thought he had real power, but he quickly finds it was only temporarily given him by the older gangsters, and just as quickly taken away. Mifune fills this film with energy, and this leads to one of the most brilliant hand-to-hand fight scenes as he is nearly collapsing with TB and horrified of dying and tries to fight off his nemesis gangster.

Fantastic film.