Red Beard [Akahige] *** (1965, Toshiro Mifune, Yuzo Kayama, Terumi Niki) – Classic Movie Review 11,719

Director Akira Kurosawa’s 1965 Japanese film Red Beard [Akahige] stars Toshiro Mifune as Dr Kyojō Niide, a grizzled elderly town doctor nicknamed Red Beard, who introduces his young and arrogant new trainee intern Dr Noboru Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama), who aspires to be the Shogun’s personal physician, to work in a low-class hospital in Koishikawa, a district of Edo, in 19th-century Japan towards the end of the Tokugawa period.

The detailed reconstruction of social reality during the feudal period is painstaking and convincing, though often longwinded at 185 minutes and surprisingly over-indulgent in sentimentality for Kurosawa, at the expense of plot clarity, which takes third place to characterisation and morality.

However, there is no doubting the command of Mifune, who is quite superb, and he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the 26th Venice International Film Festival.

It is based on Shūgorō Yamamoto’s 1959 short story collection, Akahige Shinryōtan, though Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Humiliated and Insulted is the source for a subplot about a sick 12-year-old, Otoyo (Terumi Niki), rescued from a brothel.

It is Kurosawa’s last black and white film.

The film was a major box office success in Japan after good reviews there, and it was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.

Mifune and Kurosawa fell out, and it is their final collaboration after 16 films.

Filming took longer than any other Japanese film at two years. Kurosawa grew sick twice during filming, while Mifune and Kayama also fell ill. The set was designed to be as realistic and historically accurate as possible. The main set is an entire town with back alleys and side streets, some of which were never filmed, though tourist bus companies ran tours through the set in the two years of the shoot.

The cast are Toshiro Mifune as Dr Kyojō Niide, Red Beard, Yūzō Kayama as Dr Noboru Yasumoto, Tsutomu Yamazaki as wheelwright Sahachi, Reiko Dan as servant Osugi, Miyuki Kuwano as Onaka, Kyōko Kagawa as madwoman The Mantis, Tatsuyoshi Ehara as Genzo Tsugawa, Terumi Niki as Otoyo, Akemi Negishi as Okuni, Yoshitaka Zushi as Choji, Yoshio Tsuchiya as Dr. Handayu Mori, Eijirō Tōno as Goheiji, Takashi Shimura as Tokubei Izumiya, Chishū Ryū as Mr. Yasumoto, Kinuyo Tanaka as Mrs. Yasumoto, Kōji Mitsui as Heikichi, and Haruko Sugimura as brothel madam Kinl.

 © Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,719

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