Sherry Chandler

Some miscellaneous observations about Drunken Angel that didn’t seem to fit into the post below.

In one of the bonus films on the DVD, Kurosawa remarked that he tried to style Drunken Angel like a silent film. Our subtitles weren’t working real well on this piece but I think that remark explains a great deal about the acting style of Kurosawa’s films, and it’s one thing that makes the films easy to watch even with subtitles. The action is almost choreographed. A sort of hyperserious West Side Story.

It is much more stylized visually than an American film of the period, and they were stylized enough. Though Kurosawa was much influenced by American film-making, especially John Ford’s westerns, this is not an American film. The stills below give you some idea of what I’m talking about.

Toshirô Mifune was a great find for this style of film-making. He was wonderfully strong, graceful, and quick. Kurosawa has been quoted as saying

Mifune had a kind of talent I had never encountered before in the Japanese film world. It was, above all, the speed with which he expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed only three. The speed of his movements was such that he said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate movements to express. He put forth everything directly and boldly, and his sense of timing was the keenest I had ever seen in a Japanese actor. And yet with all his quickness, he also had surprisingly fine sensibilities.

The first time I remember seeing him was in Roshomon and I had never seen anything like him.

You get the full sense of that grace and quickness in the jitterbug scene of Drunken Angel. Matsunaga is on the skids, the gang boss has just taken his woman, he’s drunk and emaciated with tuberculosis when he does this dance, which comes on like a wild dance with death itself. It’s decadent. And yet there’s great joy in watching Mifune’s sheer physical grace.

He had just come out of the Japanese air force, where he worked as a reconnaissance photographer, and was emaciated enough to look like some one half-dead with tuberculosis. So you get a sense of a man near death but with tremendous vitality.

David Kehr, reviewing the DVD in the New York Times, opines that Drunken Angel is not really a noir film:

… thematically “Drunken Angel” hails back to an earlier genre, the tenement dramas of the 1920s and ’30s (“Symphony of Six Million,” “One Third of a Nation”) with their principled heroes and calls for social reform. For every virtuoso sequence — like the Mifune character’s climactic knife fight with his former gang boss, which ends with the two squirming in a pool of white paint — there is a bluntly didactic scene in which the doctor rails against feudal traditions and demands better hygiene.

That’s true to some extent but the doctor, though he is the moral center of the film, also partakes of the degradation. He lives in the slums because he wants to do good but also because he’s a drunk.

One last little thing. Wikipedia makes an unverified assertion that George Lucas considered casting Toshirô Mifune as Obi Wan Kanobe.

What a different Star Wars that might have been.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1948 film, Drunken Angel, is remarkable for a number of reasons.

For the first time, Kurosawa had full artistic control of a film (unless you count the U.S. occupation censors who enforced some fairly significant changes). The film marks Toshiro Mifune’s debut in a starring role. And it gives us a look at the ruin that was postwar Tokyo.

Unlike the other Kurosawa films I’ve seen, this one is set in contemporary times and in western dress. It could pass for an ordinary noir film about a young gangster (Mifune) on the way down and a drunken doctor (Takashi Shimura) who tries to save his body and his soul.

Except for the great open sewer around which the film revolves. The film circles round and round this cesspool. We get close-up shots of methane bubbling up and trash floating, an umbrella, a shoe, in one shot a doll floating face down like the photograph of the Buddhist monk discussed by Robert Hariman. Innocence fouled.

Great Performances describes Kurosawa’s work, especially Drunken Angel this way:

In the period following World War II, Kurosawa’s work matured and deepened in response to the conditions of national catastrophe and collapse in Japan. The war had ruined the nation, and Kurosawa spoke through film as an artist addressing this devastation and seeking a path beyond it.

In 1948, Japan was an occupied country and essentially under martial law. Kurosawa was not permitted to show bombed-out Tokyo in his films nor was he permitted to show signs of occupation. The occupation forces encouraged western dress and habits. They stressed individualism, especially for the women. They enforced freedom as the emperors had enforced servitude. One example, the occupation encouraged behaviors like public kissing, something the Japanese found shameful. I was sort of amazed at an example at once so trivial and so insensitive. I suppose, for the West, public displays of affection are signs of freedom.

The DVD we rented had a short film on Kurosawa and the censors. In it, we learned that they made him change his ending because they thought it glorified Matsunaga, Mifune’s gangster character, too much. (Matsunaga achieves a sort of redemption in death.) Kurosawa had wanted to use “Mack the Knife” as a musical theme for the gang boss, but the censors wouldn’t let him use German music because Japan and Germany were allied in the war.

These incidents strike me as considerable artistic meddling. Still, Kurosawa found ways to work around the censors, showing us a diseased population (tuberculosis, typhus, VD, alcoholism), using images like the cess pool to show us the ruin he could not depict directly.

In a time when the occupations of Japan and Germany are being held up to us as models of what we can do in Iraq, it is edifying to get a little glimpse of what we actually did in Japan. And Kurosawa manages to show us how it affected the people. One nightclub scene of jazz and jitterbug is both compelling and appalling.

Japan was not innocent of this decline and the Allied occupation was comparatively benign. Drunken Angel is a critique of Japanese society and of the ways in which Westernization exacerbated faults already there. It is also a compelling movie, one of the best I’ve seen out of that time. Mifune alone makes the film worth seeing. His struggle is not just with his own disease but also against the strong man culture that kowtows to power, legitimate or not.

I’m not enough of a film critic or a historian to put this stuff in much context. Still, we are usually not all that forthcoming about the negatives of our WWII effort and, for me, it was enlightening to get a glimpse of what the defeat meant for the Japanese people.

In the end, we had very limited success in imposing individualism on the Japanese. In the early years of our Iraq adventure, if you remember, a group of Japanese individuals went to Iraq against government orders. They were trying to help but when they were taken hostage, they were treated as traitors because they went against government orders and brought shame. The lesson may be that you can’t impose values from the top.