Drunken Angel (1948)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

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).

Film Synopsis

In post-war Japan, Sanada, a disillusioned doctor suffering from alcoholism, reluctantly extracts a bullet from the hand of a young hoodlum named Matsunaga.  Despite their differences, the two men have an instant rapport and when the doctor realises that Matsunaga has tuberculosis he offers to treat him.  The gangster grudgingly takes Sanada's advice to avoid drink and women but his resolve weakens when his former boss, Okada, is released from prison.  Matsunaga soon resumes his former habits and his health begins to deteriorate.  When he discovers that Okada plans to sacrifice him in a reckoning with a rival gang, Matsunaga is devastated and has but one desire before he dies: to kill Okada!