Drunken Angel

Template:Short description Template:About Template:Use mdy dates Template:Use British English Template:Infobox film

Template:Nihongo is a 1948 Japanese yakuza film directed by Akira Kurosawa, and co-written by Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uekusa. Produced by Toho and starring Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune, it tells the story of alcoholic doctor Sanada, and his recidivist yakuza patient Matsunaga. Sanada tries to save Matsunaga from illness and the corruption of the yakuza while Matsunaga finds himself gradually sidelined within the yakuza syndicate and becomes increasingly self-destructive. The film was the first to depict the post–War yakuza and is generally considered to be Kurosawa's first major work.

During the writing of the screenplay Kurosawa and Uekusa fought about Uekusa's growing sympathies with the yakuza due to his regular meetings with a life-model to study for the character. Production began in 1947 amid a series of labour disputes in the Toho company. Filming lasted from November of that year to March 10, 1948. During the production of the film Kurosawa encountered a number of setbacks, including the death of his father in February 1948. The film was the first of sixteen collaborations between Kurosawa and Mifune, and the first collaboration between Kurosawa and Fumio Hayasaka. It was in the production of Drunken Angel that Kurosawa began to think more about music's relationship to the image in film.

Despite encountering some censorship from the Civil Information and Education Section of the Allied occupation government, the film was released in Japan on April 27, 1948, to generally positive reviews. The film won awards for Best Film from Kinema Junpo and Mainichi Shimbun. After the international success of Rashomon (1950) at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, Toho promoted the film abroad. Analyses of Drunken Angel have looked at the pairing of multiple characters and their interactions in the post–War environment, with discussions focussing on the morality of its characters (the titular "drunken angel"), intertextual references to the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and contemporary noir fiction, and the symbolic meaning of the sump seen throughout much of the film.

Plot

Sanada is an alcoholic doctor living in a shanty town next to an open sump. He treats a small-time Template:Translit named Matsunaga—who was injured in a gunfight with a rival syndicate—despite his dislike of organised crime. Sanada diagnoses Matsunaga with tuberculosis; Matsunaga initially reacts violently but the two of them are interrupted by the arrival of Sanada's nurse Miyo. The following day Sanada goes to a bar in the local black market, which Matsunaga controls, and attempts to persuade Matsunaga to give up drinking and smoking. After Matsunaga kicks Sanada out of the bar, Sanada and Miyo discuss the imminent release from prison of Matsunaga's fellow yakuza and sworn brother, Okada, Miyo's abusive ex-boyfriend. Sanada continues treating his other patients, one of whom, a young female student, is making progress against her tuberculosis. After some pestering, Matsunaga agrees to listen to the doctor's advice and quit drinking.

However, with Okada's release, Matsunaga quickly succumbs to peer pressure and slips back into vice together with his fellow yakuza. Angered at the betrayal of his commitment, Sanada rebukes him. Matsunaga finds himself gradually displaced within the yakuza syndicate, and after losing a large amount of money playing chō-han, he collapses and is taken to Sanada's clinic for the evening. Distressed as his lover leaves him and his illness takes a turn for the worse, Matsunaga leaves his apartment and is confronted by Sanada at the open sump. Sanada beseeches Matsunaga to continue his treatment, while Matsunaga has a vision of his own corpse trying to kill him. Okada shows up at the clinic and threatens to kill the doctor if he does not tell him where to find Miyo, and while Matsunaga stands up for the doctor and gets Okada to leave, he realises that his sworn brother cannot be trusted.

Hoping to resolve the issue, Matsunaga goes to the home of the boss of his syndicate but overhears a discussion in which Okada says he intends to sacrifice him as a pawn in the war against a rival syndicate. Distressed and self-destructive, Matsunaga orders a drink from Gin, a local barmaid, who tries to persuade him to seek treatment in the countryside. The boss returns the territory of the black market to Okada, who orders the storeowners in his territory to refuse service to Matsunaga. He goes to Okada's apartment; there, he finds the yakuza with his former lover, and angrily tries to stab Okada, but starts to cough up blood. Okada then stabs him in the chest, and Matsunaga stumbles outside before he succumbs to his wounds and dies.

Okada is later arrested for the murder, but Matsunaga's boss refuses to pay for his funeral. Gin, who had feelings for Matsunaga, pays for it instead and tells Sanada that she plans to take Matsunaga's ashes to be buried on her father's farm, where she had offered to live with him. The doctor retorts that while he understands how she feels, he cannot forgive Matsunaga for throwing his life away. Another of his patients, the female student, arrives and reveals that her tuberculosis is cured. The doctor happily leads her to the market to buy her sweets.

Cast

Takashi Shimura as Doctor Sanada
Toshiro Mifune as Matsunaga
Template:Ill as Okada
Michiyo Kogure as Nanae
Chieko Nakakita as Nurse Miyo
Eitarō Shindō as Takahama
Noriko Sengoku as Gin
Shizuko Kasagi as singer
Masao Shimizu as Oyabun
Yoshiko Kuga as schoolgirl

Production

Development

Drunken Angel was made in the context of a series of labour disputes with the Toho company. The powerful trade union had managed the production of films, with Kurosawa's prior films No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and One Wonderful Sunday (1947) requiring the approval of the union. By the end of 1947, the union influence that had been exerted over the content of films produced by Toho began to wane following a series of less profitable releases. As a result, Kurosawa was able to produce the film with minimal interference from the studio and its union.Template:Sfn Kurosawa co-wrote the film with his childhood friend Keinosuke Uekusa in their second and last collaboration.Template:Sfn While staying at an inn at the seaside resort Atami, Kurosawa noticed that the prow of a sunken concrete ship was being used as a diving board by local children. Seeing it as an apt metaphor for Japan's defeat in the Second World War, this image became the open sump seen in Drunken Angel.Template:Sfn Kurosawa intended to write the film to report on—and denounce—the growing power of the Template:Translit in post–War Japan.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

During writing of the screenplay, Uekusa met up with a member of the yakuza to develop the character of Matsunaga. While he and Kurosawa had intended for his counterpart to be a morally upright humanistic young doctor, the character was difficult to conceptualise and was changed when the two remembered an encounter they had with an unlicensed alcoholic doctor in Tokyo's black market district.Template:Sfn Having spent five days prior to the doctor's change in character unsure of how to progress the script, they finished writing the film in about a day.Template:Sfn However, Uekusa's meetings with the yakuza character model caused him to sympathise with their way of life to the degree that he and Kurosawa eventually argued over his sympathies.Template:Sfn Despite the speed with which the two of them finished the script, Kurosawa recalled the two of them sharing a rocky relationship during its development. Although they remained friends, the two of them separated and did not collaborate again following the script's completion.Template:Sfn

Pre-production and production

Pre-production began in November 1947.Template:Sfn Toshiro Mifune was cast after Kurosawa saw his performances in Snow Trail (1947) and Kajirō Yamamoto's Template:Ill (1947).Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Kurosawa had seen Mifune's audition to work at the Toho company in 1946 and had directly intervened in the hiring process in order to secure Mifune a position; the jury had wrongly interpreted the actor's wild behaviour during the audition as disrespect.Template:Sfn Drunken Angel became the first of their 16 collaborations.Template:Sfn This was also the first film where Kurosawa worked with Yoshiro Muraki.Template:Sfn The film was built around a pre-existing set, used in These Foolish Times.Template:Sfn This set was of a shopping street with a black market, which Kurosawa credits for the origin of his interest in dissecting the character of yakuza gang members.Template:Sfn

The film was produced by Toho and shot in black-and-white.Template:Sfn Filming began in November 1947.Template:Sfn During the course of production, Kurosawa faced a number of personal and professional problems. Toho executives pressured Kurosawa to finish production quickly, anxious to see more films in cinemas before any more potential strikes, and actress Template:Ill became ill shortly into production—she was replaced by Chieko Nakakita in January 1948. Additionally, in February, Kurosawa's father Isamu died at the age of 83. Kurosawa felt too pressured to be able to return to Akita Prefecture during the final weeks of shooting to be with his father.Template:Sfn

Takashi Shimura loosely based his character of the doctor on the performance of Thomas Mitchell in Stagecoach (1939). Despite Shimura's role as the protagonist, Kurosawa later expressed difficulty in being able to contain Mifune's performance as the gangster so that he did not dominate the film with his screen presence.Template:Sfn Kurosawa also praised the acting of Reizaburo Yamamoto, although he described being too afraid to approach him for some time due to his "frightening eyes".Template:Sfn Filming ended on March 10, 1948.Template:Sfn A 150-minute cut of the film was made but never released; all existing negatives and prints are of the 98 minute cut.Template:Sfn

Music

Drunken Angel marked Kurosawa's first collaboration with composer Fumio Hayasaka. The two agreed on much of the film's composition. Kurosawa wrote memos (published in the April 1948 edition of Eiga Shunshu) that detailed his changing attitude towards the use of music in his films, becoming more conscious of its inclusion by matching it to parts of the script during the film's writing.Template:Sfn For Okada's introductory scene, Kurosawa and Hayasaka wanted to use the song "Mack the Knife" from The Threepenny Opera, but found that it was copyrighted and the studio was unwilling to pay for the rights.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The use of cheerful-sounding song "The Cuckoo Waltz" was designed to juxtapose the film's low-point of Matsunaga being rejected from different neighbourhood establishments.Template:Sfn Kurosawa thought to use this song when, on the day he received news of his father's death, he heard the music over a loudspeaker and found that it intensified his own grief.Template:Sfn Supposedly the director and composer shook hands after discovering that they had had the same idea separately but simultaneously. The film's sound recorder was Wataru Konuma.Template:Sfn

Occupation censorship

At the time of Drunken AngelTemplate:'s production, there were limitations placed on Japanese films by the Allied occupation government. Films were encouraged to promote individual liberties and Japan's demilitarisation, while forbidden from promoting nationalistic or feudal values. From 1946, the Civil Information and Education Section enforced a double censorship of completed scripts during pre-production and completed films following the final edit.Template:Sfn The occupation's censors required Kurosawa to rewrite several portions of the film mostly due to ethical concerns; for example, a mention of suicide was cut, and complaints were made concerning the film's frank depiction of prostitution and black markets.Template:Sfn The film's ending was also changed; originally the doctor Sanada drove Matsunaga's corpse around the Tokyo slum.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Matsunaga's manner of death also underwent several re-writes within each of which he was killed by different people.Template:Sfn

Themes

Post–War dual identity

In his study of Kurosawa's filmography, Stuart Galbraith IV sees the gangster Matsunaga and Doctor Sanada as linked by their illness. To Sanada, Matsunaga represents the "chaotic temptations of postwar Japan", which Sanada relates to his own past behaviour. However, Matsunaga equally stands for the corrupt criminality of the period's social chaos that Sanada reviles.Template:Sfn Galbraith believes that the doctor is the film's titular 'drunken angel' for seeking the improvement of others over himself despite his self-hatred; the film historian Donald Richie agrees, but believes that Matsunaga and Sanada "are angels to each other."Template:Sfn Template:Sfn To Richie, Matsunaga's death, doused in white paint, represents a blurring of morality and an apotheosis for the character.Template:Sfn Matsunaga is also paired with various women in the film: he and Sanada's nurse Miyo each have a relationship with his old yakuza boss Okada, however, she resists returning to her old life; additionally, one of Sanada's patients is also afflicted with tuberculosis, but is able to overcome her illness. Both Matsunaga and Sanada have women that love and care for them in what Galbraith terms a "Hitchcock-like parallelism".Template:Sfn It is these women that historian David Conrad believes best embody the future, despite their marginal role in comparison to Kurosawa's earlier films No Regrets for Our Youth and One Wonderful Sunday.Template:Sfn

A violent Matsunaga pins Sanada to the wall with his elbow. — A publicity still showing Matsunaga (Mifune) and Sanada (Shimura)

The film scholar James Goodwin's perspective on the film's dual identity is informed by his reading of the psychological doubling between Matsunaga and Sanada. He recalls Sanada's paradoxical commitment to alleviating his patients' illnesses which ends their need for his services, while he himself remains an unhealed alcoholic. Similarly, when his condition deteriorates, Matsunaga hallucinates raising his own corpse from a coffin, only to be scorned by it. Both characters are positioned as sharing, "a vital [emotional] bond."Template:Sfn Richie identifies Matsunaga's hallucinatory sequence with the relationship he shares with the nurse Miyo to the yakuza Okada. The sequence follows a scene where Miyo had been recognised by the yakuza; she is then identified by an edit that sees Mifune watching a doll floating in the sump. As he hallucinates, the sump transforms into the open sea, a change in location that signifies both characters' desires to escape.Template:Sfn Richie describes the film's final scene between Sanada and Gin as a misunderstanding, since the conflict within Matsunaga was internal, they are unable to understand that his violent death was an attempt to eradicate the evil of his past self.Template:Sfn However, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto considers Kurosawa's attempt at moral complexity to be a mistake, since despite his alcoholism, Sanada remains the idealistic moral anchor of the film.Template:Sfn

Stephen Prince, in his analysis of Kurosawa's filmography, considers the "double loss of identity" present within the film. One loss which requires the individual to forge a new sense of self by separating themselves from old institutions, such as the nation and yakuza which erode personal identity. The other being symptomatic of a "national schizophrenia" that has resulted from the Americanisation of Japan which also represents an affront to the individual.Template:Sfn In the film the young are cut off from the past but still bound by its social mores.Template:Sfn Scholar James Maxfield examines the relationship formed between yakuza within the film. To him, Sanada's assertion that the code of honour observed by the yakuza is only built on money is proved correct when Matsunaga's confrontation with his syndicate's boss shows the former wearing shoes on Template:Translit with money strewn around him, indicating the two men's mutual disrespect to each other.Template:Sfn As Matsunaga continues to lose his status, Maxfield rejects any moral reasoning for Matsunaga's confrontation with Okada, rather positing that he is motivated by pride and selfishness.Template:Sfn Through this motivation, Maxfield sees the link in Sanada and Matsunaga's relationship: that because of his identification with Matsunaga's behaviour, Sanada loves him and tries to heal his own past wounds.Template:Sfn

Open sump imagery

A man only visible as an outline stands overlooking a dirty sump.

Sanada stands over the open sump, variously interpreted as a representation of contemporary Japanese society, illness, and character psychology.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Goodwin, Galbraith, and the film critic Mark Schilling, each view the open sump as a representative of the desolate post–War world.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Maxfield sees in the sump specifically the source of evil within post–War society.Template:Sfn However, both Galbraith and Richie see in the sump an additional psychological dimension, viewing the characters' reflections on the murky water as an indication of their mentality, with Matsunaga throwing his carnation away as a symbol that he has discarded his life.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Yoshimoto agrees with this psychological assessment of the sump, commenting that its appearance structures the film and establishes a psychological profile of Matsunaga that is reflected by his eventual mental breakdown as his image appears split between a three-panel mirror when he fights Okada.Template:Sfn

Richie additionally identifies the sump with a metaphysical condition as well as illness directly. Citing the scene where Matsunaga collapses after voluntarily returning to the clinic at night, because the camera movement from the clinic across the sump occurs after Matsunaga has declared his intent to reform himself, the movement implies a more ambiguous future.Template:Sfn Prince links this sequence with a prior scene containing a similar series of dissolves that links Miyo to the sump, an image that constrains both her and Matsunaga to a decaying social space.Template:Sfn He writes that the narrative and spatial confinement of much of the film close to the sump returns the film's action to sickness, posing the question of how recovery can emerge from a humane ethic under post–War conditions.Template:Sfn

Intertextuality

David Desser points to Drunken Angel as an early example among Kurosawa's films of demonstrating how Western culture impacted Japanese society, i.e., that it represents an adaptation of different modes of thought from American gangster stories and the existentialist literature of Fyodor Dostoevsky.Template:Sfn Similarly, Goodwin writes on the intertextual qualities of the film and Kurosawa's references to different artistic mediums. He considers the final fight between Matsunaga and his rival among spilt paint to be a kind of "action painting" and also compares Drunken AngelTemplate:'s literary qualities to the novels of Dostoevsky.Template:Sfn In particular, Goodwin focusses on a process of psychological doubling found in Dostoevsky's novels, wherein internal paradoxes and contrasting personalities—such as those of Matsunaga and Sanada—form a dialogue on suffering and human nature.Template:Sfn In comparing characterisations, the film theorist Noël Burch compares Sanada and Matsunaga to Prince Mishkin and the characters of The Lower Depths for their "stubborn fantasising" amidst a series complex social obligations.Template:Sfn To Conrad, Kurosawa's focus on illness in a world of yakuza and Template:Translit girls, so employing the genre trappings of film noir, served to criticise American governance via the aesthetics of American culture.Template:Sfn

Release

Theatrical

Drunken Angel was released in Japanese cinemas on April 27, 1948.Template:Sfn Upon the film's completion, Kurosawa went to Akita to observe the memorial services of his father, but was recalled as the Toho union's strikes had escalated.Template:Sfn The new company president, Template:Ill, vetoed union-supported films and fired 1,200 employees. In response, the union occupied the building, halting production on new films. The strikers were placed under siege by police and the American military, the studio ended their pay, and shut down the filming lot on June 1. In need of money, Kurosawa directed two stage productions, one of Anton Chekhov Template:'s A Marriage Proposal, and the other an adaptation of Drunken Angel.Template:Sfn Kurosawa soon left the studio, being both disillusioned by executives' attitudes to the union, and by the state of siege the occupying strikers were put under. In his memoir Kurosawa writes that the studio, "I had thought was my home actually belonged to strangers".Template:Sfn

The film was one of only four productions that Toho released in 1948, reflecting the studio management's priorities amidst disruptive strike action.Template:Sfn Toho promoted the release of the film throughout the 1950s, with it premiering in the United States in January 1960 as part of a nine-film release licensed by Brandon Films.Template:Sfn The film was re-released in the United States in 2002 as part of the "Kurosawa & Mifune" film festival.Template:Sfn

Home media

A VHS version of Drunken Angel was released by Home Vision Cinema.Template:Sfn The Criterion Collection released a Blu-ray version of the film alongside other Kurosawa films in a 2009 box set.Template:Sfn

Reception

Box office

The re-release of Drunken Angel in 2002 as part of a multi-title film festival accrued $561,692 Template:USDCY in total.Template:Sfn

Critical response

Contemporary opinion

Upon release in Japan, the film received positive reviews.Template:Sfn However, there were some critics who did not believe the film went far enough in condemning the activities of its protagonist or the yakuza world at-large.Template:Sfn According to Kurosawa, critics referred to him as a journalistic filmmaker.Template:Sfn Japanese audiences were surprised by Mifune's emotional performance, a form of expressiveness that was not generally seen in Japanese cinema of the time. Galbraith compares the impact of, and audiences' positive reaction to, Mifune's performance with Marlon Brando Template:'s in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).Template:Sfn Japanese critics have pointed to Drunken Angel as embodying the post–War epoch in Japanese society, with comparisons made to Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Paisan (1946).Template:Sfn

In a 1954 article for Sight and Sound, prior to any wide international release, filmmaker Jay Leyda discussed Drunken Angel in the context of growing international interest in Japanese cinema, praising its range, cinematography, and fluid structure.Template:Sfn Writing just prior to the American release, Bosley Crowther Template:'s 1959 review for The New York Times, cites the film's creation of an unpleasant atmosphere in his positive appraisal of its symbolic moral conflict. He also gives a positive account of the acting and Kurosawa's "forceful imagery", despite criticising some of the film's unoriginal formal methods and clichés.Template:Sfn A review in Variety magazine compared Drunken Angel to Italian neorealist cinema in its depiction of contemporary Japanese society; the review also praised the film's acting and pursuit of morality within the post–War devastation.Template:Sfn However, a negative review by Dwight Macdonald in Esquire negatively compared the film to the simultaneous American releases of Ikiru (1952) and The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945), criticising the film as an "embarrassingly familiar gangster melodrama."Template:Sfn

Retrospective opinion

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Drunken Angel has a 94% approval rating.Template:Sfn A review in Slant Magazine gave the film three stars out of four, praising Kurosawa's dynamic cinematism.Template:Sfn In a 2007 essay for The Criterion Collection, East Asian scholar Ian Buruma writes on the changes taking place within Japanese society as seen in Drunken Angel. He perceives the lack of Allied soldiers and Template:Translit girls within a narrative where traditional 'feudal' loyalties to the state have been used to justify crime and immoral behaviour as an effective criticism of the pre– and post–War social orders.Template:Sfn Writing for New York Press in 2010, film critic Armond White praised the film's handling of the balance between remorse and grief. Although he considers some of its symbolism obvious, he writes appreciatingly of its deployment and favourably compares the film to later social and crime dramas.Template:Sfn

Awards and accolades

Template:Plain row headers

Award	Date	Category	Recipient(s)	Result	Template:Refh
Mainichi Film Awards	Template:Dts	Best Film	Drunken Angel	rowspan="3" Template:Won	Template:Sfn Template:Sfn
		Best Cinematography	Template:Ill
		Best Music	Fumio Hayasaka
Kinema Junpo	Template:Dts	Best Film of the Year	Drunken Angel	Template:Won	Template:Sfn

Legacy

Drunken Angel is often considered Kurosawa's first major work.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Leyda credits Drunken Angel as the precursor responsible for the entry of Rashomon (1950) into the 1951 Venice Film Festival, and thus exposing non-Japanese audiences to post–War Japanese cinema.Template:Sfn Kurosawa later reflected on the film's structural weakness which he mostly attributed to Mifune's intense screen-presence, one which overshadowed Shimura's role as the moral centre of the film.Template:Sfn However, the director saw it as the first film where he began to think about the image's relationship to music, and remembered it happily as the first film that was his own, i.e., the first that was free from the interference of the studio, union, and wartime censorship.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn In a 1960 interview with Donald Richie, Kurosawa considered the film's popularity at the time of its release to be due to it being the only film in cinemas that took an interest in its characters.Template:Sfn Kurosawa later referred to Drunken Angel as the first of his films that used dynamic compositions.Template:Sfn

In Mark Schilling Template:'s study on yakuza films, he cites Drunken Angel as the first to depict post–War yakuza. Schilling notes that the film does not follow many of the genre expectations within the genre, which he attributes to Kurosawa's humanism, examining how the world around the yakuza influences their actions.Template:Sfn In a 2002 interview, actor Bunta Sugawara likewise referenced the film as the first post–War yakuza movie.Template:Sfn Conrad cites Drunken Angel as the first post–War film with a yakuza protagonist.Template:Sfn

References

Citations

Template:Reflist

Bibliography

External links

Template:Commons category

Drunken Angel - Japanese With English Subtitles, online video (1 hour, 38 minutes, 14 seconds), at Archive.org

Template:Akira Kurosawa Template:Navboxes Template:Authority control

Drunken Angel

Contents

Plot

Cast