Red Beard (1965)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Film Review

Disappointed by the lukewarm reception to his film noir thriller High and Low (1963), Japan's leading director Akira Kurosawa pledged 'to make something so magnificent that people would just have to see it'.  That film - Red Beard - was to be one of Kurosawa's longest and most ambitious, in fact the most expensive film to have been made in Japan at that time.  The director's striving for authenticity became a kind of mania.  For the set, he ordered the construction of a small town that was a perfect replica of a Japanese town of the mid-1800s, built exclusively with materials from that period and part of the country.  The set was so large that much of it never found its way onto the screen and it became a popular tourist attraction.

Kurosawa was just as fastidious over the shooting of the film.  Filming was frequently held up for weeks as the director waited for just the right kind of rainfall or level of sunlight to come along, with the result that the film took over two years to complete.   Kurosawa's insistence that his lead actor Toshirô Mifune kept his beard throughout the two-year shoot prevented the latter from finding other work and led to an irreconcilable falling out between the actor and the director.  When Mifune walked off the set of Red Beard he and Kurosawa would never work together again, and, whilst they expressed mutual admiration in later years, they never again communicated with one another.  It was a bitter end to one of the greatest partnerships in cinema history.  Of the seventeen films that Kurosawa made between 1948 and 1965, Mifune had appeared in sixteen.

Kurosawa clearly intended that Red Beard was to be his magnum opus, the crowning achievement of his career, and in some respects it is.  The film is a faithful adaptation of a collection of short stories by Shugoro Yamamoto, whose story Peaceful Days had been the starting point for Kurosawa's earlier Samurai hit Sanjuro (1962).  Compared with the bravura spectacle of the director's previous historical pieces, Red Beard is a surprisingly low key affair - slow paced and far more preoccupied with character development than action-oriented extravaganza.  The narrative essentially consists of a series of vignettes and has nothing like the structural complexity of, say, Rashomon or Seven Samurai.  And yet, despite this, and despite its three hour runtime, Red Beard is one of the most compelling of Kurosawa's films, and arguably the most sincere expression of his social and humanist concerns.

As in Kurosawa's earlier masterpiece Ikiru (1952), Red Beard is fundamentally about one man's self-discovery and redemption in the face of gruelling, seemingly insuperable adversity.  This time the protagonist is an arrogant trainee doctor who, initially, thinks only of making a name for himself so that he can marry into a wealthy family.  He resents being placed in a clinic that caters only for the stinking poor and does everything he can to convince his superior that he is not the man for the job.  However, the young doctor comes to see the error of his ways and gradually he realises this his goal in life is not personal advancement but selfless devotion to the needs of others.  This is a far more optimistic view of human nature than we see in most of Kurosawa's other films and it reflects the director's own growing confidence in the inherit goodness of mankind.  In the hands of a lesser director, Red Beard could have been hopelessly sentimental, but Kurosawa approaches the subject with genuine sincerity and feeling.  The result is one of his most compassionate works, not quite the humanist masterpiece he perhaps envisaged making, but a powerfully moving film all the same.

Much of the power of Red Beard comes from the slowly evolving relationship between the two main protagonists, the older doctor Niide and his young apprentice Yasumoto, played to perfection by Toshirô Mifune and Yûzô Kayama respectively.  The mentor-pupil relationship echoes that seen in Kurosawa's earlier Seven Samurai, in which Mifune had played the part of the hot-headed acolyte (to Takashi Shimura's worldly wise Samurai instructor).  Yasumoto's transformation, from an arrogant me-me-me know-all to a sympathetic and selfless carer, is gradual and convincing, brought about by the grim realities of life to which he is exposed in the course of his apprenticeship.  So immense is the transition that, on paper, it barely sounds credible, and yet so subtle are the performances, the writing and the direction that the audience never has a moment's cause to question the veracity of Yasumoto's spiritual rebirth under Niide's guidance.  Kurosawa could hardly have wished to create a more inspiring film than this.

There is only one thing that prevents Red Beard from being perfect - the inclusion of a misplaced action sequence, which Kurosawa presumably felt he had to crowbar in to reward the fans of his Samurai films.  For a few minutes, the benevolent Dr Niide (Mifune) allows himself to be taken over by the spirit of Sanjuro so that he can floor a gang of bodyguards who are disturbing his good work at a brothel.  With surprising (one might say fantastic) agility, Dr Niide makes light work of the bodyguards, happily cracking their bones and ripping their muscles (the gruesome sound effects leave absolutely nothing to the imagination) before kicking their mangled carcasses into the dust.  "I might have gone a bit too far", he quips soberly afterwards and thereupon reminds his pupil that it is a medical man's job to cure people, not mash them to pulp.  As stunningly executed as the sequence is, it does jar painfully and only serves to undermine the credibility of the character Niide.  (It is about as mad and pointless as James Robertson Justice giving Jiu jitsu lessons to Dirk Bogarde in Doctor in the House.)  Fortunately, the rest of the film is so unfalteringly impressive that we can forgive Kurosawa this one self-indulgent frolic.

There are two sequences in Red Beard that stand out as being particularly memorable and good examples of Kurosawa's work in his mature period. The first is an extended flashback sequence in which a dying man, much loved by his community, recounts how he found and lost the one true love of his life.  One of the most lyrical and poignant passages of any Kurosawa film, this sublime narrative digression feels like a conscious homage to the director's main contemporary in Japan, Kenji Mizoguchi.  In a snowy setting redolent of a child's fairytale, a young man and a woman first discover their feelings for one another and go on to live the perfect romantic idyll, before fate conspires to tear them apart.  There is a romanticism and humanity to this sequence that is virtually unique in Kurosawa's oeuvre, revealing a far more sensitive side than we might expect for someone is primarily known as an action film director.

The film's other highpoint is the extremely moving scene in which Niide attempts to save a young boy who has taken poison, along with the rest of his family, to avoid disgrace brought about by the boy's thieving.  As the good doctor does what he can, the serving girls gather around a well and call out the boy's name, falling back on an old tradition which they believe will prevent the boy's spirit from being swallowed up by the earth.  Just as Niide assures us that the boy is out of harm's way, the camera pans down the well and stops to focus on the water at the bottom.  There is a brief pause and then a bubble breaks the water's surface, leaving us in no doubt that all is going to be well (excuse the pun).

Despite its enormous production cost, Red Beard did succeed in turning a profit; it was both a critical and commercial success in Japan.  Its international release was, however, far less successful and consequently this is the one great Kurosawa film which is often overlooked in the west, and unjustly so.   The film marked a decisive turning point in its director's career.  It was not only the last film that Kurosawa made in black-and-white and his final collaboration with Toshirô Mifune, it was also the last film of his phenomenally successful middle period, which began with Rashomon (1950), the film that introduced western audiences to Japanese cinema.  Immediately after completing Red Beard, Kurosawa allowed himself to be lured to Hollywood where two major setbacks came in quick succession: the aborted Runaway Train and the blockbuster Tora! Tora! Tora!, from which he was forced to resign owing to differences with the studio.  When Kurosawa returned to Japan, his country's film industry was in a state of decline as television began to overtake cinema as the main entertainment medium.  His next film, Dodesukaden (1970), was a commercial disaster, and led him to attempt suicide.  It was not until the 1980s that Kurosawa regained something of his creative power and prestige, with his lavish period pieces Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985), but even then his best work was long behind him.

Film Synopsis

In mid-19th century Japan, Yasumoto, a young doctor fresh out of medical school, sees a bright future for himself and has high hopes of becoming the personal physician of the Shogunate.  He is therefore understandably unhappy when his father arranges for him to take up an internship at a provincial clinic which ministers to the region's poor.  Yasumoto takes an immediate dislike to the austere doctor who runs the clinic, Kyojio Niide, known to all as Red Beard.  Niide's gruff demeanour and his insistence on seeing Yasumoto's notes on western medicine make the young doctor surly and rebellious, and he does everything he can to create a bad impression, hoping that Niide will lose patience and dismiss him.  When Yasumoto witnesses the suffering of the poor sick people who come to the clinic and the untiring compassion that Niide shows in treating them his mood begins to change...