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 post-war derelict Tokyo. At the centre of the neighbourhood is a swamp, a dirty, disease ridden dump with umbrellas and other waste jutting out, a setting for all the low-lifes that live around it. Matsunaga has got TB. An alcoholic doctor in the neighbourhood called Sanada, 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 danger 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: