Drunken Angel

In a Tokyo slum during occupation, an alcoholic doctor treats patients suffering from tuberculosis.  At the slum's center, a enormous cess-pool breeds mosquitoes, black mud blistered with gas-bubbles.  Akira Kurosawa directed Drunken Angel in 1948 and the picture is influenced by American film noir of the period.  Of course, the filthy, rotting lagoon at the center of the squalid village-like slum is symbolic:  the cess-pool represents moral decay at the heart of Occupied Japan.  Prostitutes dressed to attract GIs line the mud alleys around the fetid swamp.  The signs are all in English:  No. 1 Dance Hall, Bolero, and The Social Center of Tokyo.  Kurosawa's point is clear:  The Americans are part of the moral rot and, perhaps, its guarantors.  Although American censors prohibited any criticism of the regime by the Japanese, Kurosawa was allowed to use the signs because they were already there and not part of a set manufactured for the film.  American influence is dramatized by its overt absence from the film.  In fact, the entire movie is fundamentally American in genre and form.  At this stage in his career, Kurosawa (never the most subtle director) was heavy-handed in his application of moralizing to his films.  As always, however, his imagery carries the day and manages to suggest, with its horrific close-ups of the rotting garbage in the bog, a metaphysics of decay.  The pustulent lesion in the slum is equated with the moral rot represented by the gangsters and this malaise, in turn, is symbolized by tuberculosis,  the "big hole" in the gangster's lung that the doctor detects when he first examines Matsunaga (the yakuza played by Toshiro Mifune in his first role with Kurosawa).

A wise-guy, Matsunaga goes to Dr. Sanada (Takashi Shimura) to have a bullet yanked out of his hand.  Sanada, who detests gangsters, performs the necessary surgery without anesthesia.  He tells the gangster that he suspects that the man has tuberculosis.  The gangster is outraged and strangles Sanada half to death.  Sanada gives as good as he gets -- he pitches crockery at the yakuza and rages at him.  Sanada is an alcoholic curmudgeon (we see him drinking the clinic's medicinal alcohol) -- "curmudgeon" is too mild a word.  The doc's bedside manner consist of growling at his patients and throwing things at them when they defy his orders.  Nonetheless, he is revered in the slum as the "drunken angel" who treats the poor without expecting that they pay him.   And Dr. Sanada states one of the film's morals -- that is, the application of scientific reason, as opposed to irrationality, to human problems is sufficient to defeat them.

Sanada's nurse is fearful because her old boyfriend (who beat her up and gave her a dose of syphilis for a good measure) has been released from jail.  The thug's name is Okada and he's a "made man" under the protection of the "big boss."  Matsunaga becomes Sanada's patient -- he is, in fact, suffering from tuberculosis.  The two men fight whenever Matsunaga comes for a consultation -- he can't admit to himself that he's sick and views his infection as a weakness.  He's also obviously terrified of the disease and conceals his fear behind a facade of toughness.  But the facade is cracking and for the last half of the film, Matsunaga is spitting up blood and staggering around with cadaverous, almost Kabuki-like make-up that gives him the appearance of a ghost or reanimated cadaver.  Okada, the yakuza just out of jail, makes a move to displace Matsunaga as the neighborhood's wise-guy. There's a gang-war in the offing and the big boss plans to sacrifice Matsunaga, who is doomed anyway, in the conflict.  It's Matsunaga's habit to pluck a flower from a vendor's display each time he passes the shop.  This is tribute that the businesses in the neighborhood offer to him.  But, near the end of the film, when he takes a flower, the shop-girl runs after him and asks him to pay -- the local businesses are now under the protection of Okada.  Matsunaga goes to Okada's lair and is killed in a knife-fight. (Kurosawa's films are full of violence but he resists glamorizing killing -- the film's big knife-fight involves a bucket of paint that is kicked over and makes the floor so slippery that neither of the combatants can do anything but writhe around in the muck.  This is an effect similar to Kurosawa staging the last big battle in The Seven Samurai in a rainstorm that has made the ground a sea of mud.)   Before his death, like many doomed thugs in American films, Matsunaga has dreamed of escaping the slums and living a clean life in the country -- Sanada's nurse is now his girlfriend and has been caring for him in her home, and she offers him this chance to become a new man.  But he's killed and in the final scene, the nurse plans to take his ashes with her to the country, an idyllic rural place that we never see and can scarcely imagine.  Dr. Sanada's favorite patient, a plucky school girl arrives with news that her x-rays show that her tuberculosis is cured.  (Throughout the film, Sanada has outraged Matsunaga by repeatedly telling him that the little girl has more courage than the gangster.)  No one drains the swamp.  In fact, draining this particular swamp is unimaginable.  (A few years later, in Ikiru, the dying bureaucrats drains a similar swamp, turns the waste-land into a playground, and, famously, dies in the snow seated in a children's swing.)

The film is closely modeled on American film noir -- there's even a sequence in which someone wields a weapon reflected by three mirrors, a trademark of American movies of this kind, mirrors featuring most notably in Orson Welles The Lady from Shanghai made the same year.  American influence is ubiquitous -- the signs tell us that the slum profits from American soldiers who support its vice and criminals.  The sleazy dance-halls play caricatures of American blues and jazz.  At the "Number One", the band seems always performing a properly funereal if decidedly plodding and square version of "St. James Infirmary."  In one scene, a Japanese singer, wearing extravagant feathers, performs a song called "Jungle Boogie" -- she growls and wails saying that the is a "she-panther."  The  number is startling and the censors must have been asleep to ignore it's obvious, and rather brutal, parody of American jazz.  The woman yowls like a demented Yma Sumac, and Sumac's mambos were already a parody of a  parody.  In the climactic confrontation, Sanada abuses Matsunaga has being an unwitting victim of "a feudal system" that demands absolute fealty -- "the Japanese," he says, "have already made too many pointless sacrifices", a statement that is clearly an indictment of the Japanese military and its Emperor.  I presume that these lines were injected into the script by the American censors, although this is just surmise on my part.  It would be like an American DA lecturing a mobster on the fact that the bad guy has brought "Sicilian feudalism" to the Bronx.