Classic Flicks: Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard

By Joseph Allencherril     10/5/11 7:00pm

Most film buffs will at least pause at the altar of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. So much has been elegantly said and written about Kurosawa that it feels almost redundant to write an appreciation of his films, but his influence seems to be more indirectly felt by modern audiences. Kurosawa's works have inspired popular filmmakers, from western film guru0 John Ford to the king of pulp, Quentin Tarantino.

While watching the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone as a child, I tangentially came upon the work of Kurosawa; Leone's Man with No Name trilogy starring Clint Eastwood (A Fistful of Dollars) owes a tremendous debt to Kurosawa's cinematographic techniques. In fact A Fistful of Dollars is essentially an unofficial remake of Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo (1961).

After spending the 1940s learning the director's craft as he made less remarkable wartime films, Kurosawa kicked off the 1950s — which was to be his golden period — with Rashomon, a film which gained Kurosawa international recognition and an entirely new audience both in and outside Japan. Rashomon is probably Kurosawa's most popular film, but another, more mature Kurosawa film, Red Beard, should also be addressed (1965). The film is notable for not being a samurai film, as many of Kurosawa's films were. It was the last of 16 films in which Kurosawa collaborated with Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune (to use a analogy, Toshiro Mifune was to Kurosawa as John Wayne was to John Ford). After Red Beard, Kurosawa took a five-year hiatus before returning to film.

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The action of the film takes place in 19th-century Koishikawa, in the district of Edo. Yuzo Kayama assumes the role of young Dr. Noboru Yasumoto, who is fresh out of a Dutch medical school in Nagasaki. As the son of a well-established physician, the overconfident Yasumoto aspires to be a personal physician and believes that he should work through the relatively safe military structure of medical education.

However, to Yasumoto's chagrin, he has been assigned to a rural clinic for his postgraduate medical training. The clinic is under the guidance of Dr. Kyojo Niide (Toshiro Mifune), who is called "Akahige" (Red Beard). Yasumoto believes that working under Red Beard will not benefit him as the elder doctor appears to be a tyrannical control freak solely interested in his pupil's medical notes. Furious with his posting, Yasumoto rebels against Red Beard by entering the forbidden garden where he meets "The Mantis" (Kyoko Kagawa), a mysterious girl whom only Red Beard is allowed to examine.

Before encountering Kurosawa, I had always assumed that Japanese cinema was peppered with the same exaggerated acting cliches and trite plots, as in traditional Japanese Noh dramas. But Red Beard is a film that should be required viewing for pre-medical, medical school students, residents and even patients everywhere. Red Beard is not just another film about life and death — it is the film about life and death; the same material molded in the hands of another director could easily turn out trite. In fact, the film itself might be compared to the training of a physician — lengthy and maybe even circuitous at times, but ultimately a profoundly rewarding experience.

If, after seeing Red Beard, you happen to fall in love with Kurosawa, I recommend the following films: The Idiot (1951), Seven Samurai (1954), I Live in Fear (1955), Sanjuro (1962) and Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985). Kurosawa's output understandably slowed as he grew older because he began to face mental and physical problems. Consequently, the thematic matter of Kurosawa's films changed. To get a deeper sense of Kurosawa's development as an artist, one should watch one of his early films (from the 1950s) and at least one later film (from the 1970s and beyond).

Joseph Allencherril is a Will Rice College sophomore. Classic Flicks is a column reexamining and rediscovering the best that cinema has to offer.

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