silver nitrate notes

Drunken Angel and Kurosawa Meeting Mifune

10 feb 2018

Akira Kurosawa made Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi, 1948) in occupied postwar Japan. It was the first film in which he directed Toshirō Mifune. The cinematographer was Takeo Itō (with Tadashi Iimura second unit), Kurosawa's regular DP from his earlier Toho films before he began working primarily with Nakai and Miyagawa. Drunken Angel is, in most surveys of Kurosawa, identified as the film in which his mature style begins.

The plot. An alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) works in a slum near a stagnant, polluted sump. A young yakuza (Mifune) comes to him with a gunshot wound. The doctor diagnoses the wound as superficial but also diagnoses tuberculosis in the gangster. The gangster refuses treatment. The doctor pursues him. The relationship becomes, over the course of the film, one of frustrated compassion on one side and barely-contained violence on the other.

Itō's photography works the sump as the film's central image. The stagnant pool in the middle of the slum is photographed recurring throughout the film, often with flotsam and detritus visible in the water. Kurosawa wanted the sump to function as a visual metaphor for the postwar condition of the neighbourhood. Itō obliged by lighting it at different times of day, from different angles, so that the same body of water would register differently in each scene. The water, by the end of the film, is a character.

Mifune, at twenty-seven, was a new contract player at Toho. Kurosawa had seen him in a screen test for another film and had insisted on casting him over the studio's preference for established actors. The gamble paid. Mifune's performance is intensely physical, almost balletic in its restlessness. He cannot stand still. He coughs. He rages. He dances drunkenly. Kurosawa would use him in fifteen more films.

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sources
[1] Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press, 3rd ed. 1998.
[2] Prince, Stephen. The Warrior's Camera. Princeton UP, rev. ed. 1999.
[3] Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Knopf, 1982.
[4] Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Duke UP, 2000.