• 赤ひげ (Red Beard)

11/27/20 (Fri)

This 1965 work is one of Kurosawa’s most popular and acclaimed films, so I was looking forward to seeing it despite the off-putting three-hour running time.

The setting is a rural village in the mid-19th century towards the end of the Edo Era. A privileged medical student (Kayama Yuzo) expecting to serve as the shogun’s physician pays greetings at a poor public clinic in what he believes a formality, only to learn that he has in fact been assigned there. He detests his surroundings, complaining of the low life and stink (“the smell of the poor”, he is told), and imperiously refuses to wear the uniform or follow the rules. He is eventually won over by the clinic’s virtuous head doctor, known as Red Beard (Mifune Toshiro), who seeks to heal his patients’ souls as well as their bodies (shades of the earlier Drunken Angel). Moreover, his experience with a sickly young waif in the film’s second half brings him an understanding of the struggles of the kindly townspeople. He eventually receives his commission to the shogun, but turns the offer down in order to stay and help the underprivileged (probably a good thing since the already struggling shogunate was overthrown just a few years later).

A film full of clichés and melodrama. The young city guy who learns to love the poor country folk, the benevolent all-but-perfect doctor, the abused young girl who gradually comes to trust humanity again. Yuck. The script seemed cobbled together from a dozen other movies of this type. The patient doctor in particular was too good to be true, virtually auditioning for sainthood. The twists and turns of the story are not worth going into, but none are particularly convincing, such as the predictable scene when the city boy finally changes out of his samurai wear and into the hospital gown or the dying moppet at the end who had to steal to eat. In addition, the film introduces certain characters, like the crazy murderous woman (Kagawa Kyoko), and then simply disposes of them in a rather unorganized approach. I got the sense that part of the story was cut, though that’s probably not a bad thing in this case.

The one consolation was the superb production. The director’s eye for detail was as sharp as ever, and the meticulously constructed town was amazingly atmospheric, helped by superb camerawork from start to finish. Kurosawa takes his time in telling his story, and as hackneyed as some of the scenes were, nothing felt extraneous in the context of the melodrama. The film might have worked better as a two- or three-part miniseries.

The cast was competent if not overly memorable: Mifune did what he could with an underwritten role (he did get a nice fight sequence, where he overwhelms his attackers and breaks a few bones), and Kayama was passable as the young doctor. I was surprised to see Tanaka Kinuyo and Ryu Chishu in tiny roles; talk about luxury casting. This was the last of Mifune’s 16 films with Kurosawa after some apparent acrimony, and while the reason for their breakup has never been divulged, I can’t imagine that the actor was happy with the one-dimensional character or sappy lines he was given here.

I can understand the box office success in its day given the idealized view of the good doctor; in the US, Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare were airing at around the same time. But I don’t get the positive critical reception at all other than the undeniably strong production values. Kurosawa’s social conscience and abiding interest in the rich-poor divide are fine, but we don’t need to be hammered on the head with it. His constant contrast of the young doctor’s boast of his Western education (“Dutch study”) with Red Beard’s more spiritual approach may have been a knock against Western values. The flawed Drunken Angel, where such criticism was also implicit, at least had an interesting take on a doctor’s story. Red Beard was trite and unworthy of Kurosawa’s catalog, though I seem to be the only one who thinks so. Not recommended.