Our Toshiro Mifune centennial tribute has come to its final day. Here's Cláudio Alves...
Throughout his career Toshiro Mifune worked with some of the best Japanese directors ever, becoming the face of that country's cinema in the aftermath of World War II. He gave great support to Mizoguchi's leading ladies, provided emotional intensity to Naruse's deepfelt dramas, was perfect in Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion and utterly iconic in many a Hiroshi Inagaki production. Still, his collaborations with Akira Kurosawa remain the most important. From 1948 to 1965, they made 16 films together, ranging from crime thrillers to action spectacles, from melodrama to historical epics, and the great majority of them are either considered classics or should be.
While I find High and Low to be their best film and Throne of Blood to feature Mifune's greatest performance, when it came time to choose, I knew there was no other option than to write about Red Beard. Released in 1965, it was the last film the Emperor and the Wolf ever did together. It's also an absolute masterpiece that deserves much more love than it usually gets...
To understand why I consider Red Beard an underrated gem, I should probably explain how I came to watch it. When I was in college, I found myself enamored with post-war Japanese cinema. Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa quickly became some of my favorite filmmakers. My adoration of these pictures led me to read about their creators and collect whatever version I could find of their films, whether Blu-Ray or DVD, scratchy transfers or pristine restorations. Of the Mifune Kurosawa films, Red Beard was the one I read the least about, seeing as it was barely mentioned in the books I got from the Portuguese Cinematheque and few people talked about it online.
What was mostly available about it was the information that it was the last time Toshiro Mifune ever worked with Akira Kurosawa, a grueling two-year shoot full of careful research into historical details. Mostly, it was a footnote, making me fear a hypothetical mediocrity. Even I Live in Fear, the least masterful of their joint filmography, is more discussed than Red Beard. If the '65 picture didn't come included in a box-set of Kurosawa films I bought, it's likely I still wouldn't have watched it to this day.
Nevertheless, once I had seen all the other Kurosawa DVDs I had, it was time to finally look at Red Beard. It's fair to say I was flabbergasted by what I witnessed. Before watching the previous Kurosawa flicks, I knew of their reputation and importance, making my expectations high. The opposite occurred with Red Beard, making its godly perfection somewhat shocking. Not to mention that, considering the rest of Kurosawa's canonized classics, this three-hour-long medical melodrama set in 19th century Japan, scored by death-rattles and lush strings, came off as a bit of a surprise.
For a director infamous for favoring broad acting styles and paying little mind to female characters, Red Beard is full to the brim with showcases for its cast as well as a rich panoply of female roles. Some long-protracted sequences are savage monologues wherein a great actress (Kyōko Kagawa, Haruko Sugimura, and Terumi Niki to name a few) emotionally eviscerates herself in front of the camera. It's more akin to Bergman than to the jidaigeki classics that made Kurosawa internationally famous. The Japanese director's painterly compositions and mastery of rhythm are still present - stylistically, this is typical top-tier Kurosawa - but the focus of the scenes and its content almost feels new.
In this cineaste's career, only The Lower Depths' tale of human misery comes close to Red Beard's milieu. Part of it comes from the sort of disciplined contention that pervades the entire film, whose story can seem soap opera-ish but is told with the tonalities of a mournful poem. This is the tale of an arrogant medical student with big aspirations who's first job takes him to a clinic in Edo whose patients are mostly poor dispossessed people. It's a position with little money and even less prestige.
Initially, our young protagonist wants to be dismissed and seek employment elsewhere, but the teachings of the wizened Dr. Kyojō Niide, nicknamed 'Red Beard,' end up changing the way the youth looks at his vocation.
Through this narrative of a master teaching his pupil, Kurosawa devices a grand portrait of a society where the ones who need help are promptly trampled by the powerful. It's a bleak cosmos where wealthy shoguns get sick from overindulgence while peasant families prefer to poison themselves rather than suffer death by starvation. Still, that bleakness allows Kurosawa's warm humanism to shine through and not come off as schmaltzy. This entire film is a plea for kindness and a celebration of those who dedicate their lives to helping others. Even when an explosion of bloody violence occurs, it's followed by a critical assessment of the carnage. Red Beard, the just assailant, doesn't pride himself in his actions, he mourns his rage even if he knows it was necessary.
That dynamic is what makes Toshiro Mifune's performance so titanic. After years playing hotheaded rebels, young pupils of impressive old men, and shouty up-and-comers, Mifune ended his years by Kurosawa's side with a couple of stoic character studies that show how the actor could be as subtle as he could be bombastic. Despite playing the titular role, Mifune is almost a supporting presence, his stony face functioning as a barometer of morality for the younger protagonist. Red Beard is a man disgusted by the world he inhabits. He's angry all the time but has learned to use that anger and transform it into fuel for righteous action.
Still, despite such a dark interiority, Mifune finds morsels of humor and aching compassion, fatherly warmth, and a hero's commanding spirit. Watching him try to keep up a façade of gruffness during the film's last moments is genuinely heartwarming. In summation, Red Beard is a masterpiece, gentle and brutal, probably one of the best composed and blocked films ever made, a desperate plight for the downtrodden, a hymn of admiration to the medical profession and a showcase for some the best Japanese actors of the 1960s. This cinematic miracle is available on the Criterion Channel, don't miss it.
Previously
Lynn Lee on Stray Dog (1949)
Nathaniel R on The Hidden Fortress (1958)
Eric Blume on Yojimbo (1961)
Photo Gallery of Mifune