Red Beard (1965)

Red Beard (1965)

starring Toshirō Mifune, Yūzō Kayama

directed by Arika Kurosawa

185 minutes

in Japanese with English subtitles

During the early to mid 19th century, a young doctor, Noboru Yasumoto (Yūzō Kayama), is sent to visit an older more established doctor, Kyojō Niide aka Red Beard (Toshiro Mifune). Yasumoto's fiancée recently broke off their engagement. Yasumoto had hoped to land a choice job. He is fresh from medical training and doesn't realize that he is expected to work under Niide until he arrives there.

Niide runs the Koishikawa Clinic (located in a poor neighborhood of Edo) with an iron fist. Yasumoto does what he wants (at first) and doesn't follow Niide's rules. He hopes that the elder doctor will dismiss him but living at the clinic, interacting with Niide and the other employees of the clinic, and it's patients, starts to change Yasumoto.

He comes around and begins to learn from Niide. He stops wallowing in his own misery over the woman who left him. He learns also from the deaths of a couple of patients, one of whom (Sahachi) tells a lengthy story before dying about his life and the woman he loved but lost, twice.

Niide and Yasumoto rescue a 12 year old girl from a brothel. Niide places Otoyo, the 12 year old, in Yasumoto's care. Her road to recovery is not without impediments. She remains at the clinic after she recovers. She has no interest in returning to the brothel and works to make a place for herself in the clinic.

Thoughts

There is more to this film than my summary encompasses. The story is episodic. Yasumoto plays a role in most of those episodes. It ends on a high note. Many of the episodes, especially after Yasumoto cleans up and starts following Niide's rules, were fairly moving. Mifune is the top billed actor and he is in the movie from beginning to end but it really isn't his character's story.

The intermission in this movie comes around the 115 minutes mark. The story takes it's time in developing. The part after the intermission moves much more quickly.

I am very happy that I finally got around to watching this movie. I wish I had seen it in the theater last summer. I meant to. It was shown as part of a 10-film Kurosawa retrospective. I passed on it due to time constraints and because I thought it was available to watch on a couple streaming services. Ultimately I wound up having to go through inter library loan (ILL) to see it.

Kurosawa was one of four screenwriters who worked on the script for this film. It was based in part on a novel of the same name by Shūgorō Yamamoto. The character of Otoyo wasn't part of that novel but added by Kurosawa who based much of her story on a character from Humiliated and Insulted by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Notes

This is the 12th film that I have seen in which Toshirō Mifune appeared. He was the star or one of the stars of all of those films. 

This it the third film I have seen in which Yūzō Kayama appeared. I saw one of the other two films, Sanjuro (1962) in the past few years.

Tsutomu Yamazaki played the part of Sahachi. This is the second film I have seen in which he has appeared. The other was High and Low (1963). 

There are a number of other actors in this film that I have seen in other movies: Takashi Shimura, Reiko Dan, Kyōko Kagawa, Tatsuyoshi Ehara, Akemi Negishi, Yoshitaka Zushi, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Eijirō Tōno, Chishū Ryū. Some of these actors I know by name or face but there are a few whom I do not. Most if not all of them have been in other Kurosawa films.