Drunken Angel (1948)

Interesting facts

Drunken Angel is a 1948 Japanese yakuza film directed by Akira Kurosawa and co-written by Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uekusa. Produced by Toho and starring Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune, it tells the story of the alcoholic doctor Sanada and his yakuza patient Matsunaga. Sanada tries to save Matsunaga from illness and the corruption brought about by the crime in the community while Matsunaga finds himself gradually sidelined within the syndicate and becomes increasingly self-destructive. The film was the first to depict the post-Second World War yakuza and is generally considered to be Kurosawa's first major work.

Production

Drunken Angel was made in the context of a series of labour disputes with the Toho company, a major Japanese film studio. The powerful trade union had managed the production of films, with Kurosawa's prior works No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) and One Wonderful Sunday (1947) requiring the approval of the union. By the end of 1947, the union's influence had waned following a series of less profitable Toho releases.

During writing of the screenplay, Uekusa met up with a member of the yakuza to develop the character of Matsunaga. While he and Kurosawa had intended for his counterpart to be a morally upright humanistic young doctor, the character was difficult to conceptualise and was changed when the two remembered an encounter they had with an unlicensed alcoholic doctor in Tokyo's black market district.

Pre-production began in November 1947. Toshiro Mifune was cast after Kurosawa saw his performances in Snow Trail (1947) and Kajirō Yamamoto's These Foolish Times (1947). Kurosawa had seen Mifune's audition to work at the Toho company in 1946 and had directly intervened in the hiring process in order to secure Mifune a position; the panel had wrongly interpreted the actor's wild behaviour during the audition as disrespect.

The film was produced by Toho and shot in black-and-white. Filming began in November 1947. During the course of production, Kurosawa faced a number of personal and professional problems. Toho executives pressured Kurosawa to finish production quickly, anxious to see more films in cinemas before any more potential strikes, and actress Keiko Orihara became ill shortly into production—she was replaced by Chieko Nakakita in January 1948.

Takashi Shimura loosely based his character of the doctor on the performance of Thomas Mitchell in Stagecoach (1939). Despite Shimura's role as the protagonist, Kurosawa later expressed difficulty in being able to contain Mifune's performance as the gangster so that he did not dominate the film with his screen presence.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.