A Very Kurosawa Christmas: Drunken Angel (Dir Akira Kurosawa, 1h38m, 1948).

This being the season of goodwill to all, it's again time to consider suitatable Christmas fare, and five films by Akira Kurosawa. Readers, for years, I've (jokingly) offered friends and family alike the gift of a non-stop bonanza of Japan's greatest filmmaker as a Christmas treat. This year, I'm gifting you all reviews of five of the director's best films. What better place to start, then, than the film that brought arguably the greatest Japanese actor-direction duo of all time together, as a drunken doctor (Kurosawa's other major collaborator, Takashi Shimura) attempts to cure a small-time yakuza, or gangster (the iconic Toshiro Mifune), bent on self-destruction, whilst providing a template for the depiction the Japanese criminal underworld in cinema for decades to come, against the background of a slowly recovering, if corruption-ridden Post-War Japan

By 1948, Akira Kurosawa was already an established figure in Japanese cinema; introduce to a life in cinema by his brother, and affected by his death in 1933, the young Kurosawa soon rose through the ranks, as assistant director for seventeen films under Kajirō Yamamoto, ranging from samurai pictures, to comedies, supplementing his work with scriptwriting, most notably the popular war film, Tsubasa no gaika (A Triumph of Wings, 1942), before his directorial debut, in the form of Sanshiro Sugata, a film that ran foul of the censors, critiqued by the Japanese government as being too Western, and only saved from banning by its champion,Yasujirō Ozu, before making first propaganda films (most notably The Most Beautiful) and the post-war dramas No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and One Wonderful Sunday (1947). More importantly, Kurosawa had assisted, as a script-writer, in the production of the action adventure film, Snow Trail (1947) featuring Toshiro Mifune, a charasmatic young actor, and, already aware of Mifune's mecurial sensibilities, Kurosawa began work on his first true directorial film.

Drunken Angel is a film about corruption-we begin with Shimura's doctor, Sanada, a drunk, who largely treats those who are criminals, other down and outs, or those who are still recovering from the impact of the Second World War. Into this world comes Mifune's gangster, Matsunaga, imjured with a gunshot to the hand, but soon, mostly due to Sanada's persistance and the gangster's consumptive cough, revealled to be suffering from tubercolosis. It's quickly revealed that the doctor is treating other patients with the disease, one of whom, a young girl. is a recurring character .Despite the danger he is in, and the worsening of his condition, Matsunagi angrily rebuffs the doctor, until, worn down by his illness, hard living, and the doctor's constant interventions, eventually consents to medical treatment.

With the return of his yakuza brother, Okada, (the sinister figure of Reisaburo Yamamoto), who is also bad news for the doctor's assistant Miyo, as the yakuza is her former, and clearly abusive boyfriend, so Matsunaga succumbs to peer pressure, returning to his vices, even as his illness becomes worse, until he eventually collapses in the middle of a gambling session, and is taken in by the doctor who once more attempts to treat him. Yet, by this point Okada's vindictiveness against his former sworn brother, and Matsunaga's growing realisation that he is little more than a pawn, to be disposed of by the boss of his syndicate weigh heavy upon hin. All of this builds towards an ending that fully exposes the callousness and indiscriminatness violence of the yakuza clan, the reckless of the anti-heroic Matsunaga and the first of many Kurosawa depictions of doomed youth, tempered by hope, and perfectly outlines what Kurosawa saw in the young actor who would become his mirror in over a dozen films to come.

Drunken Angel is dominated by three themes. The first is, undeniably Mifune. Mifune owns this film, from the very first frame in which his yakuza stalks into frame, that electric quality, that barely restrained rage that would become a Mifune trademark, as he scowls and postures and grimaces his way through the medical examination that culminates in a bullet being taken out of his hand, and the slow realisation that this is not his only malady is a masterpiece of character introduction through the physical, rather than the verbal performance. That Mifune manages to play the same character whilst ailing, that aggressive macho energy suddenly having to face its own fragility, especially when practically crawling from his sick bed in the attempt to win back his boss, and later to confront his former sworn brother in the film's climax only further showing Mifune's quality this early into his film career.

Against this, the film places the yakuza-Drunken Angel would practically codify, albeit almost entirely focusing upon their adverse effect on the society they inhabit, rather than their samurai-esque code of ethics, later seen in the 1960s heyday of the ninkyo eiga (chivalry) era of the genre. As a result, but for Mifune's grudgingly good-natured petty crook, who is largely spat out and discarded by the organisation he once served at the first sign of his illness, the yakuza we encounter are cruel, senseless and utterly without honour-Okada is little more than a thug who threatens the doctor and his former girlfriend, whilst the boss of the gang, and the other yakuza are even less pleasant, a group of men that largely gamble and drink away their lives, close to what Mifune's gangster could have been, and far from what the yakuza have come to represent in Japanese cinema.

At its centre, Drunken Angel is about corruption in post-war Japanese society. Despite the stringent censorship placed on Japanese cinema by the then-occupying American forces, much of Kurosawa's intent remains in place-at the centre of this is the very literal rot. This is represented by the swamp in the middle of the community that acts as visual shorthand for the corruption, and control that the yakuza has over the area, but Kurosawa goes further, much of the film's depiction of post-war Japan downbeat and like its anti-heroic protagonists, living in this world-or attempting to-despite the sickness, the illness that pervades its small chunk of Tokyo.

Drunken Angel remains a remarkable piece of cinema, uniting Mifune and Kurosawa in a masterfully made film where Mifune's small-time gangster battles against his former colleagues and against his own mortality. It would be the start of a friendship and working relationship that would last for nearly two decades. What they would do next would be one of the greatest Japanese films ever made.

Rating: Highly Recommended.

Drunken Angel is available to watch online in the UK via The BFI, and on DVD from The BFI and Criteron. It is also currently available to stream via Criterion, and on DVD from Criterion

Next week, we continue with Kurosawa and Mifune, as we discuss one (of many in this season) of the greatest Japanese films ever made, as the fallability of man, and contradictory views of a murder clash in Rashomon.

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