Sherry Chandler

Drunken Angel

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.

Possibly related posts:

A bit more about Drunken Angel

Stray Dog

The Drunken Poet of Danville

As You Like It

The sociology of the Netflix queue

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