The first image we see in Drunken Angel is a close-up of a fetid urban swamp, so black and bubbling with pollution that it might as well be a tar pit. Akira Kurosawa will return to similar images throughout the film, and as he does so, that swamp becomes more than just the setting for the action, but a symbol for humanity’s worst impulses, all the sins and weaknesses that destroy our lives and the lives of everyone near us. In 1952’s Ikiru, Takashi Shimura plays a man who is able, with great effort, to transform a mosquito-infested cesspool into a children’s playground, but there is no sense in Drunken Angel that Shimura’s character — a village doctor waging a futile war against typhus and tuberculosis — will be able to do much of anything to clean up his surroundings. The film ends on a hopeful note, with a girl he’s been treating celebrating her victory over TB, but that maggot-infested swamp will still exist, and Shimura will probably keep on drinking even more heavily in hopes of (temporarily) forgetting all about it.Kurosawa famously said that Drunken Angel was the first film which he considered wholly his own, the first time he was able to work without studio interference or severe budget constraints. It’s also his first film with Toshiro Mifune, who plays Matsunaga, a gangster who takes the news that he’s dying of tuberculosis almost as an excuse to race towards his grave even faster than ever. Mifune is the most stylized and startling presence in any Kurosawa film so far — he lurches across the screen, his hair constantly askew, often seeming barely in control of his own performance. His energy is so strong that he practically changes the style of the film every time he bursts on screen; the film seems naturalistic and sometimes even neorealist when he’s not there, and boldly expressionistic when he is. He's playing a small, pathetic man... but in a way that makes him almost to big for the film surrounding him to contain him.
For instance, in one memorable sequence at a cabaret, the band strikes up a song about the jungle, and it’s as if Mifune takes the lyrics as his cue to go savage — he starts making animal noises and cuts loose with some wild steps, his eyes goggling, in a way that’s funny and terrifying all at once. There’s also a wild climactic fight scene between Mifune and a senior yakuza that winds up with them wrestling in a hallway in a sea of white paint. Sonically and visually, Mifune keeps making his scenes more extreme, more high-impact. Even his face gradually takes on the appearance of an expressionistic mask — with makeup shading his cheeks to make them hollower and his cheekbones more stark, he often resembles Conrad Veidt’s somnambulistic zombie in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
But there’s an interesting wrinkle in the film in that Shimura’s impatient but idealistic doctor, whose desire to cure Mifune’s illness is so desperate that every time they meet, he winds up physically fighting him, may be just as much of a wreck as his patients. He’s depressed and alcoholic, often given to melancholy thoughts of his days as a student, when he threw away a promising future on liquor and prostitutes. (A former classmate runs a prosperous clinic in a nearby town.) The success or failure of his attempt to treat Mifune, then, become almost like a referendum on his own potential for redemption.
That’s a moving theme, albeit dramatized a little too melodramatically for my tastes. (It’s amazing Shimura has any unbroken bottles left in his office at the end of the film; every time Mifune comes in for a checkup, he winds up throwing every bottle he can get his hands on at Mifune’s head.) Still, Mifune is a marvel, and Drunken Angel is fascinating to watch, just to see him and Kurosawa both eagerly learning from each other, even in their first collaboration pushing each other towards greatness.
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