film, eyeballs, brain

So Barb emails me and asks me for my review of Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi). There’s little I can add to what Barb has already said so well, except to note that the real highlight of the evening was culinary rather than cinematic. (Barb, let me tell you that that was the best arroz caldo I have ever had in my life, scout’s honor.)

But back to Drunken Angel. The excitement here is seeing a very young Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimizu — Mifune, in particular, looking oddly like an even more dissolute Bryan Ferry circa 1982 — gain each other’s wary trust. Shimizu is a doctor who lives in the slums not out of any commitment to the downtrodden; it’s because he is downtrodden, reeling in a drunken haze most of the day and with no one to call family except for a former gun moll / bar girl he is harboring in his house. That is, until Mifune arrives, as a similarly dissipated Yakuza gangster who has been diagnosed with tuberculosis.

It has all the elements of noir, and it’s filmed that way, with oblique shadows and pinstripe suits. In his pre-color films, Kurosawa seems to have a visual fascination for soiled squalor, suggesting the indignity of the proceedings, and there’s a knock-down, dragged-out fight scene in spilled white paint, the equivalent of all that mud in Stray Dog and The Seven Samurai.

Drunken Angel has the muscularity of a “character study” film from the ’70s — you can almost imagine an alcoholic Paul Newman or Jeff Bridges (or Nick Nolte, later), gargling with vodka in the morning and flailing around in impotent rage the rest of the day — and if it sounds somewhat hackneyed, it kind of is. Shimizu, in his inexplicable eagerness to save the dying gangster, will inevitably save himself in the process as well, and he does. In the end, it’s probably lesser Kurosawa, which — considering his body of work — means that it’s better than ninety percent of the films out there.

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