Film Review
Rashomon
(1950) was the film that introduced western audiences to the cinema of
Akira Kurosawa, but this was the twelfth full-length film he had made
and by this time the director had already established himself in his
native Japan. Having cut his directorial teeth with seven fairly
nondescript films (which include some wartime propaganda work),
Kurosawa had his first real breakthrough with
Drunken Angel, the first film that
he felt belonged to him and in which he was able to assert his own
creative vision. On the face of it, this would appear to be a
pretty inconsequential work, lacking the ambition and deep insights
into human experience that illuminate Kurosawa's subsequent
masterpieces. A slightly awkward mix of Yakuza (gangster) movie
and sentimental melodrama, the film would be easily overlooked were it
not for its recurring moments of brilliance and the outstanding
performances from two of Japan's most important screen actors.
Drunken Angel may lack the
subtlety, coherence and narrative power of Kurosawa's later films but
it bears his unmistakable auteur signature and encompasses many of the
themes that would preoccupy the director for much of his career, in
particular the capacity that human beings have for personal change and
the necessity to look beyond false illusions and see life at it really
is. What made the film so daring for its time (and what no doubt
made it a critical and commercial success in Japan) was its shameless,
but highly effective, appropriation of the techniques and iconography
of western cinema. Kurosawa's admiration of the great
American filmmakers (notably John Ford) is most evident in his later
Samurai films, but most, if not all, of his films show a strong
influence of western cinema. It was Kurosawa who made the big
close-up acceptable in Japanese cinema (many of his contemporaries,
including the great Kenji Mizoguchi, regarded the close-up as
meretricious trickery) and it was Kurosawa who pioneered the black art
of cinematic self-referentialism (many years before the French New Wave
directors brought legitimacy to the term
homage). Nowhere is the
influence of American cinema on Kurosawa more visible than in his Yakuza
films (
Drunken Angel,
Stray Dog,
The Bad Sleep Well) - all are
effective pastiches of American film noir. Another strong
influence on
Drunken Angel is
Italian neo-realism - the exterior sequences depicting a country
visibly scarred by war closely match what we see in contemporary films
by Roberto Rossellini.
Perhaps the most significant thing about
Drunken Angel is that it marked the
beginning of Kurosawa's long and fruitful collaboration with the actor
Toshirô Mifune, who would star in fifteen of the sixteen films he
would subsequently make, including most of his great masterpieces,
notably
Seven Samurai (1954),
Throne of Blood (1957) and
Yojimbo
(1961). Mifune may not have been the greatest Japanese actor, but
what he lacked in range and subtlety he more than made up for in
charisma and economy. No other actor was as well suited for
Kurosawa's uniquely physical brand of cinema and the director's dark
and complex explorations of the male psyche. Speaking of Mifune,
Kurosawa once remarked: "The speed of his movements was such that he
said in a single action what took ordinary actors three separate
movements to express." Mifune was equally in awe of his director
and their partnership was to be one of the most successful in cinema
history, although it ended in acrimony during the gruelling production
of
Red Beard (1965).
Drunken Angel also begins
Kurosawa's collaboration with the talented composer Fumio Hayasaka, who
would score some of his best films, in particular
Ikiru
(1952) which contains some of the most poignant and evocative music of
any Japanese film. Ironically, Hayasaka would himself die from
tuberculosis, whilst working on the score for Kurosawa's
I Live in Fear (1954).
Mifune's brooding presence, mesmeric gaze and powerful physique
dominate
Drunken Angel, so
much so that he very nearly eclipses the film's nominal lead actor,
Takashi Shimura (another favourite of Kurosawa, who appeared in 21 of
his films). That Mifune doesn't steal the focus entirely is down
to Shimura's rare talent for imbuing his characters with devastating
humanity and depth. Like a master storyteller, he gently engages
our interest and slowly draws us into his character's inner world; by
contrast, Mifune is a bullying sergeant major who grabs us by the
scruff of our necks and dares us not to pay attention. In
Drunken Angel, the two actors
complement one another superbly, forming the kind of character
dichotomy that is a central feature of Kurosawa's oeuvre - opposites
who are inexplicably drawn to one another and who are ultimately shown
to have much in common.
It is not entirely clear which of he two protagonists is the 'drunken
angel' of the film's title. Both Sanada and Matsunaga are
habitual drunks, and both qualify as angels (of the fallen
variety). The two characters are evidently mirror images of each
other - the disillusionment, bitterness and alienation of one is
clearly reflected in the other. Both share the same malaise, a
revulsion for living and a lack of purpose, and it is soon apparent
that each offers the other a last hope of salvation. By treating
Matsunaga's tuberculosis, Sanada starts to overcome his own existential
sickness. The uneasy rapport that develops between the two men, a
grudging mutual dependency (which perhaps echoes that of Mifune and his
director), is a dummy run for the master-pupil relationship which the
same two actors would later portray in
Seven Samurai.
Whilst
Drunken Angel
struggles to knit together its thriller and melodramatic elements into
a coherent whole, and whilst it is perhaps too heavily reliant on stock
clichés for its own good, it does manage to redeem itself with
some moments of inspired genius, and some of the imagery that Kurosawa
conjures up has an enduring potency. Perhaps the most memorable
sequence in the entire film is when Matsunaga's eyes fasten on a
child's doll lying abandoned, facedown in a muddy pool of water.
Not only do we immediately feel the gangster's sudden awareness of his
own mortality, the certainty that he is soon to die, we are also struck
by the sheer futility of existence. This is how we are all
destined to end up - lifeless dolls lying forgotten in the mud.
Just as impressive visually is the climactic fight scene in which
Matsunaga and his boss Okada end up sliding about on the floor in
paint, robbed of their dignity and humanity as they try to annihilate
one another. Even though Matsunaga, predictably, loses the
contest, he seems to win a moral victory as he dies, symbolically, not
in a festering sump but amid freshly washed laundry. Then there
is the bizarre dream sequence in which Matsunaga smashes open a coffin
on a deserted beach and is confronted with his own corpse, which comes
back to life; the ensuing chase on the seashore can be read as an
expression of the gangster's desire to elude death or a frantic attempt
to discover his identity. Filmed in slow motion with a series of
overlapping dissolves, this haunting excursion into fantasy may owe
something to Carl Dreyer's
Vampyr (1932) and has a
striking similarity with the dream sequence in Ingmar Bergman's
Wild Strawberries (1957).
In common with much of Kurosawa's work,
Drunken Angel exploits the
trappings of a popular genre to make an oblique but damning commentary
on Japanese society at the time. When Kurosawa made this film,
Japan was still under American occupation, but another, far more
malignant force was beginning to assert itself, the cult of
the Yakuza gangster. Strict censorship prevented Japanese
filmmakers of the period from making any overt reference to the
occupation, but
Drunken Angel's
allusions to it are plentiful and highly suggestive. The
bad guys - the gun-crazed, preening, decadent gangsters - are all
arrayed in trendy American zoot suits, complete with wide lapels and
padded shoulders. They frequent sleazy nightclubs that belt out American
jazz tunes, and they walk and talk with an American swagger.
Early on in the film, a fetid germ-infested pond (a crater presumably
caused by an American bomb) is identified as the source of the
infection that is blighting the district, an obvious metaphor for the
corrosive influence of the occupation on Japan's post-war morale.
Kurosawa doesn't only rail against the Americans; he is equally
condemnatory of the misguided political ambitions that brought Japan to
its ruin. "The Japanese will always sacrifice their lives for
stupid ideals", remarks Sanada. Kurosawa's anxieties over
the growing influence of the Yakuza and his deep mistrust of those
running the country would prove to be well-founded - it is a theme that
the director would frequently revisit in later films, most eloquently
in his bleak satirical masterpiece
The Bad Sleep Well (1960).
© James Travers 2012
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Next Akira Kurosawa film:
Stray Dog (1949)