I recently watched Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard (1968), inspired by the novel of the same name by Shugoro Yamamoto, which is a watershed film for several reasons. For one, it is the last black and white film made by Kurosawa, it is the last collaboration between Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, and it is a culmination of the humanistic side of Kurosawa that is reflected in other films like Stray Dog and High And Low. It is set at the end of the Tokugawa period when a young doctor Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama) returns from study with the Dutch in Nagasaki and stops at the Koshikawa Public Clinic, to pay his respects to the director known as red beard (Mifune) and finds out that he is to work there. (Side note: Koshikawa is the district next to Kohinata in Bunkyo-ku where I live, and there is a Koshikawa Clinic there still today!) During the course of the film, he learns to accept his role there and learns compassion from his master Red Beard as he reaches a higher level of consciousness and lives to help others. There’s a subplot in which he helps a traumatized youngster recover that was inspired by the Dostoyevsky novel, The Insulted And The Injured, Kurosawa was a big Dostoevsky fan. The film is known for it’s elaborate set that was authentic to the architecture and materials used to make houses more than a hundred years ago. The film is epic in its themes, story, and execution. It is almost 3 hours long and has an intermission, but was interesting in the context of the other Kurosawa films I have been watching, as themes emerge and I begin to recognize different actors portraying widely different characters.
Comments