Sherry Chandler

A bit more about Drunken Angel

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.

Possibly related posts:

Drunken Angel

The sociology of the Netflix queue

The Drunken Poet of Danville

The Sand Pebbles

Steamboat Round the Bend

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