Tag Archives: Drunken Angel

DODES’KA-DEN (Akira Kurosawa, 1970).

September 2, 2026UncategorizedAkira Kurosawa, DODES’KA-DEN, Drunken Angel, Red Beard, Takai Saito, The Lower DepthsNotesonFilm1

DODES’KA-DEN (Akira Kurosawa, 1970). The title is onomatopoeia, the equivalent in English of ‘clackety-clack.’ It begins with a young boy and his mother. She prays as he gets ready to ‘go to work’. The boy has a whole fantasy life. He’s obsessed with trams and imagines himself as a tram inspector. This fantasy life of imagination bookends the film; DODES’KA-DEN ends with the boy returning home from ‘work’ and a sweeping shot of all the childish drawings of trams that line his home.

Opening Tram:

End Tram

In between, we get a series of vignettes of people living in extreme poverty in a shanty-town outside of Tokyo: A married woman who has children by numerous men but whose husband treats as his own, loving them all. Two couples, colour-coded in red and yellow so you can tell them apart as the drunken men end up sleeping with each others’ wives. A homeless man and his son who dream of building beautiful places but who are forced to beg for food that is often tainted. A woman who returns to her husband after cheating on him but finds he doesn’t forgive. A young girl raed by her uncle while her aunt is seriously ill in hospital. All these stories and more are tied together by women gossiping at a well, a kind of Greek chorus on the action, commenting, distancing, unifying.

The film treads the same ground as THE LOWER DEPTHS but in a contemporary setting. It highlights the extent to which Kurosawa is drawn to this milieu, evident in so many of his films from DRUNKEN ANGEL to RED BEARD. It’s got very beautiful and precise use of colour, though the palette and imagery seems very of its time, a portent of what Kurosawa will achieve later in KAGEMUSHA AND RAN, though the later work now seems timeless. There’s a melding of almost kabuki like imagery with gritty realism and brightly coloured highly stylised fantasy sequences (the homeless man imagining what he’d build) that don’t quite tie in together. The acting is for the most part excellent but off, too-much, in some key characters (the ‘businessman’ with the facial tics and the leg-spasms; the woman at the top of the visual pyramid at the well’.) And though this is the exception, it destroys the delicacy of tone of the whole and makes one realise how much work goes into getting those things precisely right. RED BEARD took two years to make; this was finished in 27 days, and it shows.

Dodes’ka-den was Kurosawa’s first film in five years. Wiki tells me it was his first without Toshiro Mifune since IKIRU in 1952, and his first without composer Masaru Sato since SEVEN SAMURAI in 1954. It was also his first colour film, shot on 35mm in classic 1.37 ratio; and the first time working with Takai Saito as cinematographer, with whom he’d go on to do such extraordinary work with colour and cinematography in KAGEMUSHA and RAN. It’s an experiment with newish technologies (first time I notice use of the zoom in his work, quite extensive here). It was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film but was such critical and commercial failure at home that it led Kurosawa to attempt suicide. To me now, it seems a flawed but essential

José Arroyo

STRAY DOG/ NORA INU (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)

August 17, 2026UncategorizedAkira Kurosawa, Drunken Angel, noir, post-war, Stray Dog, Takashi Shimura, Toshiro MifuneNotesonFilm1

I’d only really been familiar with Kurosawa’s famous samurai films. The post-war noirs in the BFI’s box set have been a discovery: the more I see of them the more my admiration for Kurosawa as a filmmaker grows.

STRAY DOG is a re-teaming of Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura from DRUNKEN ANGEL (1948). Mifune plays a young cop whose knapsack gets stolen on the bus. Inside it is a Colt revolver with seven bullets. It’s now being used to kill innocents. How many will have to die before the weapon is recovered? Will the cop survive his guilt?

Kurosawa is a master of conveying the elements themselves. Here it’s the heat and humidity of a Tokyo Summer, exacerbated by having a killer on the loose. People perspire, wipe their faces, sigh with tiredness (see the gorgeous montage below).

As the two investigators move from suspect to suspect, we get a panorama of post-war Tokyo society, all the low-lifes, criminals, prostitutes, dancers’ all with lives that exceed the activity or profession society defines them for; poor people without space; professionals on low incomes and their way of life, a rich lady who shuts her window to a crimes she’s witnessing before returning to her piano, a young dancer for whom a dress has become a symbol for a different kind of life, wished for but forever out of reach. In fact the killer ends up being someone not unlike the young inspector, a war vet whose also had his knapsack stolen, as a result left desperate and derelict, who ends up making bad choices.

The last chase scene is exciting, beautiful and expressive. Both men now handcuffed together, occupying the lower third of the frame, as young innocent children walk in the background at the top of the frame singing, and then the thief begins to weep at the choices he’s made. It’s gorgeous and moving (see clip below), as is the whole of the film. I’ve included frame grabs from some of the compositions to illustrate the variety, originality and expressiveness of Kurosawa’s compositions, which continue to astonish me.

The incredible extended montage from the beginning.

The moving and beautiful final chase scene (above)

Examples of the compositions (below)

José Arroyo

Drunken Angel/ Yoidore Tenshi (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)

August 14, 2026UncategorizedDrunken Angel, Japan, Kurosawa, Mifune, noir, postwar, Takashi ShimuraNotesonFilm1

A noir that well showcases Kurosawa’s capacity for film poetry and a young Toshiro Mifune at his most beautiful. Mifune is Matsunaga a small-time Yakuza who runs everything that can be turned to crime in the shantytown of the lower-depths of some part of derelict post-war derelict. At the centre of the neighbourhood is a swamp, a dirty, disease-ridden dump with umbrellas and other waste jutting out, a symbolic setting for all the low-lifes that live around it. Matsunaga has got TB. An alcoholic doctor in the neighbourhood called Sanada(Takashi Shimura), can cure it. If only Matsunaga would listen. But Matsunaga is trapped within ideologies of yakuza masculinity: he’s afraid and can’t show it. The word ‘coward’ is enough to drive him to extraordinary violence. Moreover, the yakuza who ran the neighourhood before him is coming out of prison and will challenge him for his turf. It’s not a good time to be ill and to be scared. Matsunaga is having difficulty living up to socially acceptable ideas of masculinity much less a yakuza code. Mifune looks so beautiful here. Cinematographer Takeo Ito and Kurosawa fill him from below, to show off his long pompadour, lit to highlight the symmetry of his face, a body that once evoked power and is now diseased, the terror that follows the peacocking. But is he the drunken angel or is the doctor who’d have a swank practice if he wasn’t so alcoholic and so fundamentally kind. Kurosawa brings in nightclub number and dream sequences. He uses mirrors and inventive, unusual compositions. He is not afraid to symbolise or to linger over the swamp, or over a song, or over a space that seems dead only to become anticipatory, a setting for action. A very beautiful film.

The Young Yakuza collapses as the old gangleader shows up to be no. 1, through a swamp that is full of junk but surrounded by music. Part of why Kurosawa is a poet.

Lingering over a corridor

Images from film that illustrate the above: