In Akira Kurosawa's Drunken Angel, Kurosawa takes on these stagnant codes of honor and mixes them with Japan's sudden and undemocratic imposition of democracy by American occupation forces and equates it all as a pestilential, gurgling cesspool, a large pond of filth surrounding a Tokyo black market neighborhood rising out of the rubble of war. Surrounding the pool, the Japanese are rudderless and unsure of where to turn and by which political value system to abide. Drunken Angel is a snapshot of a specific time in Japanese post-World War II history, of a Japan in despair, lethargy, and hopelessness.
Taskashi Shimura plays Dr. Sanada, an embittered and cynical drunk who nevertheless tries to heal the sick and seriously ill. Most of the cases he gets involve tuberculosis, the festering disease of the sinkhole of filth surrounding the enclave. He becomes even more embittered when local gangster Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune -- in his first performance in a Kurosawa film and a work of tactile, over-the-top intensity) comes for a check up. Sanada instantly diagnoses TB and the sparks begin to fly. Matsunaga refuses to believe his illness until he begins to cough up blood, and Sanada feels like a sap for caring for him at all, but he lets his Hippocratic oath get the better of him because Matsunaga's 'heart hasn't frozen over with evil yet.' Nevertheless, their doctor-patient sessions end up in shouting matches in which crockery is thrown to see the patient out of the door. Finally, Matsunaga acknowledges his illness and agrees to treatment, but then suddenly the big gangster in charge, Okada (Reizaburo Yamamoto), returns from prison and all bets are off. Matsunaga now has to make his stand against him.
Kurosawa sets the mood of wretchedness from the first frame with the bubbling ooze from the cesspool and Kurosawa maintains that fetid atmosphere throughout Drunken Angel. Characters are always mopping their brows from sweat and slapping themselves to kill the mosquitoes. Drunken Angel is enclosed, dank, and damp, and the characters trapped and scrapping, bitter and foredoomed.
Drunken Angel is the first film to touch on many of Kurosawa's themes unfettered, and Kurosawa, aware of his opportunity, hits his points unmistakably and more obviously than he would later on. Drunken Angel is much more didactic than his films that follow -- Sanada shouts at Matsunaga at one point, 'Drop the feudalistic loyalty crap. It makes me sick,' and Matsunaga later points out, 'You really gain face when you put your life on the line.' It is also interesting that Kurosawa explores the master-pupil relationship in Drunken Angel, Mifune's first film with Kurosawa. Many years later in Red Beard, Mifune's final film with Kurosawa, the master-pupil relationship is re-explored, only this time with Mifune as the doctor.
Two jaw-dropping set pieces sober up Drunken Angel. The first involves a crazed American swing band stomp with a screwball female singer channeling Cab Calloway, declaring 'I'm a she-panther' as Mifune cuts loose on the dance floor. Then there is the famed climax to the death between Okada and Matsunaga, taking places with the two gangsters brandishing knives and slipping on an overturned can of white paint in a narrow corridor. Their white, ghostly figures tumble, fall, and struggle until Matsunaga makes it to a doorway and bursts it open to the bright sunlight -- and to his death and salvation.
Drunken Angel never quite overcomes its self-importance but at certain times it soars with surprise and visual passion. It was also a film that Kurosawa had to get out of his system in order to rework his themes into more sublime forms beginning with 1949's Stray Dog.
The DVD features an audio commentary track by Japanese film scholar Donald Ritchie, a making of documentary, and 'Kurosawa and the Censors,' a visual essay that sets Drunken Angel in the context of the situation of post-World War II Japanese society.
Aka Yoidore tenshi.
Wings of sake.
