Drunken Angel: Viewer Comments

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Drunken Angel
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by Jeffrey Frawley

While not Toshiro Mifune's first film appearance, or his best with director Akira Kurosawa, this film marks his debut with the master, and the outset of a brilliant partnership. The pure energy Mifune brought to his part was nearly unknown in immediately postwar Japan. The wisdom, humanism and technical mastery Kurosawa brought were also quite remarkable.

A weary physician tries to get through to a brash and self-destructive chinpira who comes to his clinic with a gunshot wound. Each man learns something from the other, but one's fate is not easily modified, whatever one's intentions.

Decades before Lucinda Williams turned the phrase “drunken angel” into a beautifully elegiac song for the departed musician Blaze Foley, the Japanese film maverick Akira Kurosawa used the phrase (Yoidore Tenshi, in Japanese) as the title for this 1948 gangster film. Set in postwar Japan, the movie tells the story of a good-samaritan doctor who has mixed feelings about ministering to a tubercular hoodlum. This early film in Kurosawa’s long career is the first time he worked with Toshiro Mifune, who was to become the director’s frequent leading man. Drunken Angel has also been cited by Kurosawa as the film in which the immature director finally “discovered” himself. We can all be grateful for that self-discovery, for it enabled Kurosawa to go on and direct some of the greatest films of the century (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, et al.)

by Alan

Drunken Angel is another classic from arguably the greatest filmmaker of all-time. The story revolves around a petty gangster (Toshiro Mifune), who contracts TB and the Doctor (Takashi Shimura) who attempts to treat him despite the gangster's foolish pride. Mifune and Shimura, Kurosawa regulars, are brilliant in their respective roles. Kurosawa takes on film noir as well as any auteurs of his time. This is a must see for Kurosawa fans.

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