Film Review
Disappointed by the lukewarm reception to his film noir thriller
High and Low (1963), Japan's
leading director Akira Kurosawa pledged 'to make something so
magnificent that people would just have to see it'. That film -
Red Beard - was to be one of
Kurosawa's longest and most ambitious, in fact the most expensive film
to have been made in Japan at that time. The director's striving
for authenticity became a kind of mania. For the set, he ordered
the construction of a small town that was a perfect replica of a
Japanese town of the mid-1800s, built exclusively with materials from
that period and part of the country. The set was so large that
much of it never found its way onto the screen and it became a popular
tourist attraction.
Kurosawa was just as fastidious over the shooting of the film.
Filming was frequently held up for weeks as the director waited for
just the right kind of rainfall or level of sunlight to come along,
with the result that the film took over two years to
complete. Kurosawa's insistence that his lead actor
Toshirô Mifune kept his beard throughout the two-year shoot
prevented the latter from finding other work and led to an
irreconcilable falling out between the actor and the director.
When Mifune walked off the set of
Red
Beard he and Kurosawa would never work together again, and,
whilst they expressed mutual admiration in later years, they never
again communicated with one another. It was a bitter end to one
of the greatest partnerships in cinema history. Of the seventeen
films that Kurosawa made between 1948 and 1965, Mifune had appeared in
sixteen.
Kurosawa clearly intended that
Red
Beard was to be his
magnum
opus, the crowning achievement of his career, and in some
respects it is. The film is a faithful adaptation of a collection
of short stories by Shugoro Yamamoto, whose story
Peaceful Days had been the starting
point for Kurosawa's earlier Samurai hit
Sanjuro
(1962). Compared with the bravura spectacle of the director's
previous historical pieces,
Red Beard
is a surprisingly low key affair - slow paced and far more preoccupied
with character development than action-oriented extravaganza. The
narrative essentially consists of a series of vignettes and has nothing
like the structural complexity of, say,
Rashomon
or
Seven Samurai. And yet,
despite this, and despite its three hour runtime,
Red Beard is one of the most
compelling of Kurosawa's films, and arguably the most sincere
expression of his social and humanist concerns.
As in Kurosawa's earlier masterpiece
Ikiru (1952),
Red Beard is fundamentally about
one man's self-discovery and redemption in the face of gruelling,
seemingly insuperable adversity. This time the protagonist is an
arrogant trainee doctor who, initially, thinks only of making a name
for himself so that he can marry into a wealthy family. He
resents being placed in a clinic that caters only for the stinking poor
and does everything he can to convince his superior that he is not the
man for the job. However, the young doctor comes to see the error
of his ways and gradually he realises this his goal in life is not
personal advancement but selfless devotion to the needs of
others. This is a far more optimistic view of human nature than
we see in most of Kurosawa's other films and it reflects the director's
own growing confidence in the inherit goodness of mankind. In the
hands of a lesser director,
Red Beard
could have been hopelessly sentimental, but Kurosawa approaches the
subject with genuine sincerity and feeling. The result is one of
his most compassionate works, not quite the humanist masterpiece he
perhaps envisaged making, but a powerfully moving film all the same.
Much of the power of
Red Beard
comes from the slowly evolving relationship between the two main
protagonists, the older doctor Niide and his young apprentice Yasumoto,
played to perfection by Toshirô Mifune and Yûzô
Kayama respectively. The mentor-pupil relationship echoes that
seen in Kurosawa's earlier
Seven
Samurai, in which Mifune had played the part of the hot-headed
acolyte (to Takashi Shimura's worldly wise Samurai instructor).
Yasumoto's transformation, from an arrogant me-me-me know-all to a
sympathetic and selfless carer, is gradual and convincing, brought
about by the grim realities of life to which he is exposed in the
course of his apprenticeship. So immense is the transition that,
on paper, it barely sounds credible, and yet so subtle are the
performances, the writing and the direction that the audience never has
a moment's cause to question the veracity of Yasumoto's spiritual
rebirth under Niide's guidance. Kurosawa could hardly have wished
to create a more inspiring film than this.
There is only one thing that prevents
Red
Beard from being perfect - the inclusion of a misplaced action
sequence, which Kurosawa presumably felt he had to crowbar in to reward
the fans of his Samurai films. For a few minutes, the benevolent
Dr Niide (Mifune) allows himself to be taken over by the spirit of Sanjuro
so that he can floor a gang of bodyguards who are disturbing his good
work at a brothel. With surprising (one might say fantastic)
agility, Dr Niide makes light work of the bodyguards, happily cracking
their bones and ripping their muscles (the gruesome sound effects leave
absolutely nothing to the imagination) before kicking their mangled
carcasses into the dust. "I might have gone a bit too far", he
quips soberly afterwards and thereupon reminds his pupil that it is a
medical man's job to cure people, not mash them to pulp. As stunningly
executed as the sequence is, it does jar painfully and
only serves to undermine the credibility of the character Niide.
(It is about as mad and pointless as James Robertson Justice giving Jiu
jitsu lessons to Dirk Bogarde in
Doctor
in the House.) Fortunately, the rest of the film is so
unfalteringly impressive that we can forgive Kurosawa this one
self-indulgent frolic.
There are two sequences in
Red Beard
that stand out as being particularly memorable and good examples of
Kurosawa's work in his mature period. The first is an extended
flashback sequence in which a dying man, much loved by his community,
recounts how he found and lost the one true love of his life. One
of the most lyrical and poignant passages of any Kurosawa film, this
sublime narrative digression feels like a conscious homage to the
director's main contemporary in Japan, Kenji Mizoguchi. In a
snowy setting redolent of a child's fairytale, a young man and a woman
first discover their feelings for one another and go on to live the
perfect romantic idyll, before fate conspires to tear them apart.
There is a romanticism and humanity to this sequence that is virtually
unique in Kurosawa's oeuvre, revealing a far more sensitive side than
we might expect for someone is primarily known as an action film
director.
The film's other highpoint is the extremely moving scene in which Niide
attempts to save a young boy who has taken poison, along with the rest
of his family, to avoid disgrace brought about by the boy's
thieving. As the good doctor does what he can, the serving girls
gather around a well and call out the boy's name, falling back on an
old tradition which they believe will prevent the boy's spirit from
being swallowed up by the earth. Just as Niide assures us that
the boy is out of harm's way, the camera pans down the well and stops
to focus on the water at the bottom. There is a brief pause and
then a bubble breaks the water's surface, leaving us in no doubt that
all is going to be well (excuse the pun).
Despite its enormous production cost,
Red
Beard did succeed in turning a profit; it was both a critical
and commercial success in Japan. Its international release was,
however, far less successful and consequently this is the one great
Kurosawa film which is often overlooked in the west, and unjustly
so. The film marked a decisive turning point in its
director's career. It was not only the last film that Kurosawa
made in black-and-white and his final collaboration with Toshirô
Mifune, it was also the last film of his phenomenally successful middle
period, which began with
Rashomon
(1950), the film that introduced western audiences to Japanese
cinema. Immediately after completing
Red Beard, Kurosawa allowed himself
to be lured to Hollywood where two major setbacks came in quick
succession: the aborted
Runaway Train
and the blockbuster
Tora! Tora! Tora!, from which
he was forced to resign owing to differences with the studio.
When Kurosawa returned to Japan, his country's film industry was in a
state of decline as television began to overtake cinema as the main
entertainment medium. His next film,
Dodesukaden (1970), was a
commercial disaster, and led him to attempt suicide. It was not
until the 1980s that Kurosawa regained something of his creative power
and prestige, with his lavish period pieces
Kagemusha (1980) and
Ran (1985), but even then his best
work was long behind him.
© James Travers 2012
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Next Akira Kurosawa film:
Dodes'ka-den (1970)