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The salient image is the urban cesspool, it bubbles behind the opening credits and later on appears bracketed by forlorn guitar and blazing neon. (The yawning prostitutes on the bridge are fused into Fellini's weary Amazon in Roma.) Occupied Tokyo, the slum clinic and the underworld ballroom. The doctor (Takashi Shimura) is a splenetic tippler, all too aware of colleagues in ritzier positions but still raffish enough to hit on barmaids: "I may be scruffy but you get free medical care." The patient (Toshiro Mifune) is a young hoodlum wasting away inside his white suit, tuberculosis is the official diagnosis but a more existential sickness permeates his swagger. A postwar x-ray plate, "a stinking puddle," Akira Kurosawa's frenzied fever. The nurse (Chieko Nakakita) was once the mistress of the gangster (Reisaburo Yamamoto), who's fresh out of jail to reclaim his old territory. (Hawks' Scarface is brought to bear on the takeover, boiled down to who gets the moll's first dance.) The American influence is pervasive (loudspeakers blast big-band music) but not as damaging as the "feudalistic royalty crap" of the Yakuza honor code, feeding off the blood of a culture like so many swamp mosquitoes. "Human sacrifice has gone out of style." The nightclub's jitterbugging tremors (Berkeley's "Lullaby of Broadway" orgy is the model) point up an expressionistic streak that explodes in the ailing criminal's slow-mo dream—black sludge dissolves to oceanic foam, the double rises of a casket. The climax collects spasms amid splattered paint, the coda grudgingly accepts the new generation's hope. "Strays always have their reasons." Kurosawa and Mifune build on the physician figure in The Quiet Duel and Red Beard. With Michiyo Kogure, Choko Iida, and Yoshiko Kuga. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |