Drunken Angel

Some months back, TCM ran a day of films for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. Among the movies, I recorded Drunken Angel. Recently, I finally got around to watching it to do a post on here.

Nominally, the star is not Mifune, but Takashi Shimura. Shimura plays Sanada, a doctor who lives in a slum region of Tokyo that was probably poor even before all the devastation caused by World War II. The neighborhood has a festering open sewer that Dr. Sanada warns the children about. Also, beaten down by the unrelenting poverty of his neighborhood. Why couldn't he have gone into a more lucrative private practice like his classmate Takahama, he wonders?

One evening, into his practice comes Matsunaga (that's Mifune). Matsunaga claims to have injured his hand on a piece of nail protruding from a door. But when Sanada goes to extract it, he finds that it's actually a bullet, which implies that Matsunaga is part of the yakuza, since Japan's strict gun laws mean there's no way law-abiding people are going to get access to guns. But worse than that, Sanada discovers that Matsunaga has a bad nagging cough that's likely tuberculosis. Sanada suggests going to Takahama to get x-rays.

Eventually, we find out that Matsunaga had already gone to Takahama and the x-rays reveal a case of TB that, left untreated, is going to kill him in the not too distant future. We also learn that he's only temporarily the top dog in the neighborhood. He took that role over while the previous top dog, Okada (Reizaburo Yamamoto) spent four years in prison, and is on the verge of getting out. Matsunaga doesn't want to give that spot back to Okada.

Okada's looming freedom is also going to cause problems for others. Dr. Sanada's nurse, Miyo (Chieko Nakakita) was Okada's old girlfriend, and has absolutely no desire to go back to Okada. She is naturally worried that Okada is going to come looking for her, find her, and expect her to come back to him. Her family has a farm out in the country so she could probably go back there, but for whatever reason hasn't done so already.

Sure enough, Okada eventually does get out of prison. He approaches Matsunaga and finds that Matsunaga isn't intending to go back to the way things used to be, so Okada goes to the big boss. When they realize that Matsunaga has TB, they plan to use him as a sacrificial lamb. That's going to come when Okada's underlings recognize Miyo....

In some ways, Drunken Angel is one of those little movies that doesn't have a whole lot going on, at least not on the surface. But it's actually a fairly deep movie. Sanada and Matsunaga seem unlikely partners, but they both wind up on the edges of society, Matsunaga as a not very high up member of the yakuza, and Sanada only being a slum doctor. Both actors give very good performances as the story reaches its fairly obvious conclusion.

Drunken Angel has received a standalone DVD release courtesy of the Criterion Collection. That means it's rather pricey; I wish it could have been included in the Eclipse set of Postwar Kurosawa.