tough love
by Douglas Messerli
Akira
Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uegusa (screenplay), Akira Kurosawa (director) Yoidore tenshi (Drunken Angel) / 1948, USA 1959
The
particular focus of The Drunken Angel
is Matsunaga, the new head of this polluted locale, brilliantly played by the
always ready-to-spring angry young man, Toshirō Mifune. So stunning is Mifune’s
performance that, as Kurosawa describes it, he transformed the entire film,
unbalancing the original focus of the alcoholic doctor who was to be the moral
center of the work. Whether just sitting, dancing, violently reacting, or
fighting, Mifune dominates the screen in way that only Brando can. But unlike
Brando’s earthly, slightly feminine sexuality, Mifune is a kind a haggard,
skeleton version of male sexuality, a man, even the angry doctor admits, who
has the attention of all the women—and his male lackeys. Even the doctor seems
attracted to Matsunaga, discovering that his new patient—having come to him to
have a bullet removed from his hand—is also suffering from tuberculosis,
clearly a common disease in this mosquito-ridden hellhole. Although Matsunago
may outwardly seem diffident to his possible disease and eventual death, Doctor
Sanada (Takashi Shimura) recognizes in him aspects of his own youth, the
mistaken decisions of a young man who secretly is afraid of death and still has
not completely hardened his heart.
For
Sanada there is no appeasing of his patients, no quiet assurances, only
outright statements of Matsunaga’s stupidity and bluff. Sanada knows his
territory, and has no sufferance for the half-lies and appeasements of more
successful doctors, which he also knows will have no effect on the rough-hewn
toughs he must face. Time and again throughout The Drunken Angel, Sanada and Matsunaga go at it with fists and
flying objects. Their disgust with one another is as palpable as their eventual
love. In this world of masculine (and one might add, feminine) stereotypes
Sanada demands impossible absolutes: “no alcohol, no women,” while he himself
visits nearly every bar in the territory, flirting with the accessible women:
“Fall in love for someone like me,” he consuls a woman behind the bar who later
tries to lure Matsunaga into the country, “I may be scrubby but you get free
medical care.” Sanada is also hiding a young woman in his office-home who
serves him as a kind of mistress, Miyo (Chieko Nakakita), the former lover of
the now-imprisoned former gang boss, Okada (Reizaburo Yamamoto). Miyo, who has
suffered abuse and VD from her former lover, is terrified of his release, but
is also still drawn to the yakuza, a fact that equally angers Sanada, who
mutters (in one of his numerous cynical asides) “Martyrdom is out of style.”
Later he puts it more bluntly: “He tormented you, made you sick, and then
deserted you like a puppy. And you still wag your tail and follow him.”
The
intimate scene that follows, in which Sanada visits his patient in the
apartment where Matsunaga has lived with his fickle mistress, is one of the
most touching in the movie, as the gangster, lying in a fever upon the bed, is
watched over by his “angel,” who in clumsy curiosity opens the woman’s jewel
box, smells her perfume, and plays with her shadow-puppets, as the director
reveals this gruff and forbidding lector as still a very human man.
Later, the same music box is opened by Nanae, as she attempts to collect
her jewels, along with her dresses, shoes, and other attire in her escape from
her love-nest with Matsunaga—who is now an outcast both from the society (for
his contractible disease) and from his gangland world. Like Miyo before him,
Matsunaga now has nowhere to go but to the doctor’s house.
Yet
that very move further ostracizes him from his Yakuza crime associates and
further endangers Miyo’s life as Matsunaga’s former lackeys recognize her as
Okada’s former lover. When Okada and his men finally arrive to claim her, the
doctor once again fearlessly stands his ground, refusing to allow them access.
But when Matsunaga hears that he intends, the next day, to call for the police,
he is determined, despite his illness, to warn the head boss, with whom he
feels he still has some personal influence.
As
he arrives at the gangster compound, however, he accidently overhears the
gangland boss explaining why he has not yet abandoned him: he is planning to
use Matsunaga as a pawn if gang-war erupts. The news sends Matsunaga into a
further spin, now recognizing that he is not only an outsider to life, but an
outsider to the outsiders. He has no longer any connections of the living, and
determines to murder Okada.
In a
sense the entire film is a sort exploration of how the US has effected this
culture. Although censors refused to let him use any English-language signage
that may have connected this polluted slum world with the Hiroshima bombing and
the American occupation, Kurosawa dresses all his gangster’s, women and men, in
Western dress, the signs in the dense bazaar of backstreet shops containing a
mix of Japanese and English words. The film itself is almost a testament to
Hollywood film techniques. Yes, we must recognize, we have helped to create
this bleak and inescapable spot.
At
film’s end, Sanada has no patience with sentiment or excuses, however. The
world is what it is, and he is determined, despite the stupidity of groups like
the Yakuza to destroy the vermin that plague these Tokyo citizens, whether they
be bacterial or human filth. His youngest patient comes to tell him that he
owes her a “sweet,” her newest x-ray revealing that she is now free of TB. If
he has lost Matsunaga, his tough love has saved yet another life.
Los
Angeles, April 16, 2012
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