| View Larger Image | Drunken Angel - Criterion Collection | DVDStarring: Takashi Shimura; Toshirô Mifune; Reisaburo Yamamoto; Michiyo Kogure; Chieko Nakakita; Noriko Sengoku; Shizuko Kasagi; Eitarô Shindô; Masao Shimizu; Taiji Tonoyama; Yoshiko Kuga; Chouko Iida; Isamu Ikukata; Akira Tani; Sachio Sakai; Katao Kawasaki; Kumiko Kisho; Toshiko Kawakubo; Haruko Toyama; Yukie Nanbu
Directed By: Akira Kurosawa
| List Price: | $39.95 | | Price: | $35.99 | | You Save: | $3.96 (10%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | DVD | | Rating: |  | | Run Time: | 98 minutes | | Format: | Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled | | Studio: | Criterion Collection | | Number of Discs: | 1 | | Aspect Ratio: | 1.33:1 | | Release Date: | November 27, 2007 | | Sales Rank: | 28,723th |
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FEATURES | - In this powerful early noir from the great Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune bursts onto the screen as a volatile, tuberculosis-infected criminal who strikes up an unlikely, unhealthy relationship with Takashi Shimura's jaded physician. Set in and around the muddy swamps and back alleys of postwar Tokyo, Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi) is an evocative, moody snapshot of a troubled time and place,
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
In this powerful early noir from the great Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune bursts onto the screen as a volatile, tuberculosis-infected criminal who strikes up an unlikely, unhealthy relationship with Takashi Shimura s jaded physician. Set in and around the muddy swamps and back alleys of postwar Tokyo, Drunken Angel is an evocative, moody snapshot of a volatile time and place, featuring one of the director s most memorably violent climaxes. |
Amazon.com
Upon its release in 1948, Drunken Angel was hailed in Japan as Akira Kurosawa's directorial breakthrough, comparable to Kubrick's Paths of Glory in the way it catapulted Kurosawa into a higher level of artistic achievement. Kurosawa himself noted, "In this picture I was finally myself. It was my picture. I was doing it and nobody else." It is indeed an important, vital film, confidently conceived and expertly executed, illuminating themes that would dominate the finest films in Kurosawa's exceptional career. The setting is a rancid, jerry-built section of a postwar city, where a filthy, disease-ridden pond functions as a physical threat and also as the film's central symbol of decay. It's in this hardscrabble environment that a brash young gangster (Toshiro Mifune, in the role that made him a star) visits an alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) to have a bullet removed from his hand. The doctor discovers that the hot-tempered thug is also doomed by tuberculosis, seen here as the physical manifestation of the gangster's moral decay. The doctor is himself diseased by his drinking, and as these clashing men struggle to make some kind of difference in their pathetic lives (spurned by the return from prison of a ruthless yakuza boss), Kurosawa makes unlikely heroes of them both--men who undergo a personal transformation in a vile and violent world. Drunken Angel is a transitional film for Japanese cinema and especially for Kurosawa; it offers a vivid glimpse of postwar life (both rotten and restoring), and signals the full blossoming of Kurosawa's talent. And while the title role belongs to Shimura (so memorably poignant in Kurosawa's later masterpiece, Ikiru), the film belongs to the forceful presence of Mifune, whose vitality touches nearly every scene of this timeless and powerful drama. --Jeff Shannon |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 23 reviews)
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Drunken boring by Bartok Kinski (Prague)  2 Stars
August 20, 2009
A rather self-serving, cold hearted, alcoholic doctor gets bored with his dull life and decides to help a small time thief and hoodlum. Great acting and directing and yet a very boring film still came out of it. The premise is too obvious and uninteresting to be worthy for a Great Kurosawa film and this film suffers because of it.
Mifune and Shimura are captivating but they play great characters in a very boring and predictable story with plot developments you can see coming a mile away, by the second hour the film was dragging, and became predictable and tedious. The story is non-existent and the characters are so undeveloped that one could care less about them.
So unspeakably boring that I had to turn it off each twenty minutes to walk around, and I felt I had deserved a medal for that. And, by the way, I generally love Kurosawa films.
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Powerfuly moving film. One of Kurosawa's best... by inframan (the lower depths)  5 Stars
May 09, 2009
Stands up with the very best of Carné and Rossellini from the same post-war era. Shimura & Mifune have never been better which is really saying a lot. The lighting & atmosphere in this film blow away anything done in Hollywood in the same period (or any other period for that matter).
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Angelic by Horselover_Fat (Groveport, OH USA) 5 Stars
March 30, 2009
This is my favourite Kurosawa film. I tend to prefer (and relate) to more intimate, simple (or rather deceptively simple) films that deal with supposedly trivial human issues. Individuals as opposed to epic set pieces involving countries far and wide, war and political intrigue ... no thanks. One thing that can be said about Kurosawa's films is that, no matter the plot itself, they always deal with the characters themselves and not necessarily with the events going on on-screen.
Drunken Angel is a straight-forward film that is existential at times (being an existentialist - completely out of favour with the enlightened majority nowadays I'm told - I support this aspect), but also frighteningly honest at times (not to say that existentialism isn't honest - far from it, but Kurosawa takes a side and makes a firm decision to support one side over the other, wherein the pure existentialist would parlay on behalf of both sides ... or neither).
The film is of course strewn together with bits of symbolism and doomed fates intertwining and mingling between addictions and addictive personalities. The diseased pool omnipresent and sparkling with carrier mosquitoes while the children play near it unaware and joyfully uncaring, the drunken angel himself (Shimura) stuck amidst the cesspool forming an odd relationship with a young gangster (Mifune), perhaps seeing something of himself in that proud reckless face. Shimura is the anti-hero (one of Kurosawa's many anti-heroes), a flawed Samaritan who perhaps has found kindness in his doomed alcoholic state and seeks to form a fruitless one-sided friendship with another also doomed by the social criminal ladder of alcoholic proportions.
This is Kurosawa depicting humanity in its raw quivering form, but doing so in an understated, tasteful way and not yieldingly or cowardly (as many "controversial" directors often attempt to do).
The film ends with Shimura, the doctor, accepting what all doctors must accept, that he is only life's tool, he can only delay the inevitable. He must accept losing control, losing himself (or what he saw of himself in Mifune), to a force as powerful as addiction and as uncompromising. I wouldn't wish this realization on anyone and yet Kurosawa depicts it not in a sappy depressing way, but on realistic terms. It is what it is, there is no need for sorrow or regret, only acceptance and an infusion of meaning into the supposedly trivial things. For Shimura, perhaps its an alcoholic rejuvenation or perhaps it will be his salvation from that prison. Kurosawa, ever the realist, leaves that puzzle unfinished as it should be and Shimura and Mifune's fates end up being neither sad nor joyous, but simply meant to be.
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Forget the existential humanism bit. Drunken Angel is a movie about hope, and it works because of Takashi Shimura by C. O. DeRiemer (San Antonio, Texas, USA)  4 Stars
January 24, 2009
How do you choose to live? Dr. Sanada (Takashi Shimura), a drunk who has made some poor choices, has chosen brusque hope over despair. Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune) is a tough, handsome yakuza making his choices, too, and it turns out he is afraid of hope.
Sanada, a rough-tongued drunk, is a doctor whose patients are as poor as the Tokyo slum they all live in. He tries as best he can to deal with tuberculosis, which is insidious and deadly. A 17-year-old schoolgirl just may survive because of him. When Matsunaga shows up at Sanada's tiny office with a bullet wound in his hand, Sanada fixes him up and immediately suspects Matsunaga has tuberculosis. That's not a good thing for a yakuza, especially a man like Matsunaga. "That girl who just left has more guts than you'll ever have," Sanada shouts at Matsunaga. "She's looking her illness straight in the eye. You don't have a fraction of her guts. You're still scared of the dark." It gets worse. Sanada eventually persuades Matsunaga to begin treatment. When Matsunaga's old gang boss, a vindictive and cruel man, gets out of prison and takes over again, Matsunaga is drawn back to his earlier choices. As Matsunaga's illness worsens, he's isolated and humiliated, yet the relationship deepens between the young, sick yakuza and the older, wiser doctor,
What does Sanada see in the tough, violent and frightened-of-death Matsunaga...a son there never was?...himself making mistakes when he was younger?...a vulnerable human being who, whatever his crimes and attitudes, requires help?...or just a man he might somehow convince to fight against the odds? "It's not just his lungs that are bad," says Sanada. "It's like he's sick to the core. He acts tough and swaggers around, but in his heart I know he's unbearably lonely. He still has a conscience tormenting him. His heart hasn't frozen over with evil just yet." Sanada is a man who refuses to live life without hope. He can become angry when others try to. Well, Kurosawa is nothing if he isn't a director who deals with big themes. There's quite a bit of emotion that Kurosawa draws forth, and he's fortunate in having two fine actors with which to demonstrate those themes. Takashi Shimura is the heart of the movie. Toshiro Mifune, looking thin, provides the soul that Shimura's Dr. Sanada is fighting for. Drunken Angel, for all the existential humanism (as one critic pompously characterized the movie), ends on a hopeful note: That 17-year-old schoolgirl, a wager won and a piece of candy.
No director always scores 100 per cent with their movies. Kurosawa is no exception. Drunken Angel is heavy handed with the symbolism. The opening music announces with a dirge that this is a serious drama with a capital "S." There are frequent cutaways to close-ups of scum-filled puddles when Kurosawa wants to emphasize a point. There's a nighttime guitar player. For those who may know little of Kurosawa, the English title," Drunken Angel" sounds like it might be a Thirties MGM melodrama with Joan Crawford. It's an awkward title. Still, Drunken Angel is a movie worth seeing. I doubt you'll be unmoved by it.
The Criterion release looks very good. I didn't listen to the commentary, but it's by Donald Richie, the highly respected scholar of Japanese film. There are two extras about Kurosawa.
To see Takashi Shimura at his very best, watch him in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai - 3 Disc Remastered Edition (Criterion Collection Spine # 2) and Ikiru - Criterion Collection. For those interested in lonely Japanese doctors who serve their patients selflessly and with hope, this time fighting hepatitis just before the end of WWII, you might enjoy Dr. Akagi.
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a fine early Kurosawa film by Ted M. (Pennsylvania, USA) 4 Stars
March 09, 2008
This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.
Drunken Angel released in 1948 under the Japanese title "Yoidore tenshi" is Akira Kurosawa's seventh film.
It is about a gangster being treated for tuberculosis by an alcoholic physician. After one of the gangster's associates is released from prison, he tries to take over the syncicate and a fight ensuses for leadership. The film's final scene is well known and memorable.
This release contains some excellent special features. It includes a making of documentary which was part of a series of documentaries on the making of many Kurosawa films. Also included is audio commentary by Donald Richie, and a very informative documentary titled "Kurosawa and the Censors" which describes the process of how the the film had rewrites because of the censorship Japanese cinema was put under by the American occupation.
This is a great film and remains one of his best known films of the 1940's
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