Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 26-September-10
Spoiler Rating: High

Drunken Angel (1948)

From the first shot of Drunken Angel, Akira Kurosawa establishes a cesspool as his visual motif. He returns over and over to the noxious slice of Japanese slum where people dump their garbage and trapped water bubbles with toxic gases. Disgusting as it is, the pool makes an excellent focal point for the story that unfolds around it.

The titular character is a middle-aged doctor (Takashi Shimura) who drinks too much and is outwardly cranky, but who wants to save the world one person at a time. The little revealed about his past illuminates his nature completely: after sowing his wild oats he wised up, displayed brilliance as a medical student, and hung his shingle in the poor part of town while his less talented classmate went off to cater to (and become one of) the rich. His selection of a nurse (Chieko Nakakita) was an act of charity, and now they treat the simple, shady, and unfortunate — and not just their bodies. The doctor doesn't distinguish between physical and social ailments and aims to remedy them both. In this respect he finds his ideal case in a gangster with tuberculosis, who is played by Toshiro Mifune (looking very young and very gorgeous in his first of many collaborations with the director).

The gangster (or specifically, the yakuza) does not want to give up carousing, whoring, and smoking, but the fear of death haunts him. The doctor, who has had success with at least one consumptive patient, longs to make the younger man clean up his lifestyle and thus his lungs. They engage in a dance that involves heaping insults and occasional blows on each other and then coming together in tacit hope of finding resolution. Their interaction is both amusing and mournful because each man is stubborn and personal and social reformation is often impossible. This becomes apparent when another gangster (Reisaburo Yamamoto) returns to town after a stint in jail and immediately assumes the status of cock of the walk. Now Mifune is threatened from without and within, and his acceptance of what the doctor ordered comes too late. This highlights what's so moving about the film, expressed in the image of the doctor staring at the cesspool as if willing it out of existence. He cannot defeat the pool and he knows it, but he relentlessly pursues this goal anyway.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.