|
Akira Kurosawa begins with a tour de force to establish the disease and exhaustion of the war: The medical outpost in the Pacific is but a tent lashed by a typhoon, a welter of leaking roofs and flickering bulbs with the Toshiro Mifune grimace barely veiled by a surgical mask. Bloody gloves have to come off, a moment's distraction is all it takes to grab the wrong end of a scalpel and bring home syphilis and shame. Japan the rundown hospital ("used to be so clean..."), with Takashi Shimura for the direct Drunken Angel connection and Ozu's fart jokes in the ward. Tainted yet still virginal, the infected physician breaks up with his fiancée (Miki Sanjo) but locates a kindred spirit in the troublemaker-turned-nurse (Noriko Sengoku). (Mifune's own opposite number is Kenjiro Uemura's returning soldier, irresponsibly spreading his illness only to run into Doc like Eliot's "Stetson.") "Can war change somebody so much?" Ford's Arrowsmith is a model of composition, so is Wyler in deep-focus arrangements of characters bent over desks or with their backs to the screen or sitting side by side on a couch but with an abyss seemingly separating them. Desire within purity is the theme, sainthood after all being a malady of its own—the hero seizes his beloved in a fit of ardor and is halted by a flash of screen-filling light, a deluge of raging tears ensues before the dropped mask of nobility is picked up once more. "Sometimes I wish I could destroy my conscience!" The shock of his malformed newborn brings the selfish husband to his knees, white linen flapping like flags point up the healing. Red Beard completes the diagnosis. With Chieko Nakakita, Jyonosuke Miyazaki, and Isamu Yamaguchi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |