Drunken Angel (1948)
Over the course of the past few years, I have learned that I have a major love for early Japanese dramas with filmmakers like Yasujirō Ozu, Teinosuke Kinugasa, and Keisuke Kinoshita absolutely blowing me away yet when I looked at this time in film there was a clear massive hole in the shape of the absolutely legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. For whatever reason, I never had really explored his filmography despite him being easily the biggest director from the time period and still is one raved about to this day. Instead of talking about one of his major classics like Seven Samurai or Rashomon which already has had endless amounts of coverage I wanted to go a bit deeper and give one of his lesser-known films a spotlight and looking over his filmography I landed on Drunken Angel. Set in post-war Japan, Sanada is a doctor who ends up treating a young temperamental gangster by the name of Matsunaga for minor injuries but also is able to diagnose him with tuberculosis which will ultimately kill Matsunaga if not treated. Instead of taking the diagnoses and fighting his disease Matsunaga instead fights Sanada and rejects his claims yet slowly it eats away at him. Sanada can't help but try to convince him otherwise and the two go back and forth as Sanada tries to save the slowly dying Matsunaga.
Obviously with someone like Kurosawa attached to the project I anticipated something special and where overall I did enjoy the film I would believe it is a generally weaker outing from the filmmaker at least in the context of his legendary filmography. The major point that this movie missed at least in my opinion was the relationship between Matsunaga and Sanada which was not built that well. Especially towards the beginning as they are laying the foundation of this friendship they don't do a good job at investing these characters into their own complicated friendship to where it doesn't feel natural that it would continue to go back and forth throughout the film. The dynamics between the two also gets very old very quickly. If they truly wanted this to work they needed to show some development between the two quicker as for a good portion of this movie they are just constantly fighting and treating each other terribly with no golden moment where they see eye to eye until way late into the film. I will say individually though I think both of these characters are pretty interesting especially with the character of Matsunaga played masterfully by Toshiro Mifune. From his spouts of anger to his fears of death and the walls he puts up to avoid having to come to terms with it I found his character to really connect with me and was one of the hugest highlights of the film. Sanada is not quite developed to the same degree, his character's depth ends with him just caring about his patients too much which is not nearly as interesting or nuanced but at least it is something. It just is that when you put these two characters together that they don't blend nearly as well as the film hopes they would.
The plot itself is also pretty messy, as I mentioned the first half if not two-thirds of the film is simply waiting for the relationship between these two to pick up so we can get to the meat of their emotions but then once the third act hits the plot becomes overly complicated and wild. It gets very distracted with a side plot involving the gangster world that Matsunaga belongs to that ends up feeling like a distraction which ends up taking away from the emotions that are supposed to shine in the third act. Luckily it doesn't fully kill them but it definitely does hurt the payoff which already was affected by a weaker setup. Where the story does end up feeling a bit disappointing I will say that from a filmmaking perspective this really shines. The music by Ryōichi Hattori and Fumio Hayasaka is really impressive creating an amazing score that deserves more attention. The cinematography by Takeo Itô is also really nice as he brings us into this world and it is a bit of a shame that he never really got this big of a spotlight again.
Overall Drunken Angel is far from a failure, it does have some really interesting characters and emotions that do leave an impact on the audience. Unfortunately, though the story does hold itself back quite a bit with a bad build-up and distracted third act that never fully allowed the audience to engage with the deeper thoughts and emotions of the film. In the end, instead of being an angel soring high this ended up being a drunk stumbling around the bar late at night.
Overall Drunken Angel is far from a failure, it does have some really interesting characters and emotions that do leave an impact on the audience. Unfortunately, though the story does hold itself back quite a bit with a bad build-up and distracted third act that never fully allowed the audience to engage with the deeper thoughts and emotions of the film. In the end, instead of being an angel soring high this ended up being a drunk stumbling around the bar late at night.