“Once you’ve found a patient, you can’t stop fussing with him.”
So says a nurse to Dr. Sanada (Takashi Shimura) in Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel—although you could extend her observation to include Sanada’s entire community. Centered around a festering urban pond in the slums of postwar Tokyo, Drunken Angel portrays Sanada as arbiter of both the physical and moral health of everyone around him, from the kids playing in the fetid water to the yakuza hood (Toshiro Mifune) who stumbles into his clinic with a bloody hand and an early case of tuberculosis.
If this sounds moralistic (and much of the movie is), the heavy handedness is leavened by Shimura’s delightful performance as Sanada. With a pouty lower lip, a fiery temper, and the humanizing touch of a taste for whisky, Sanada has both a terrible bedside manner and a comic flair (at one point he has a goofy demonstration of how to dance the tango).
Mifune, as the gangster, brings a different charge to his first Kurosawa film—lithe yet wasting away, ferociously dancing in a nightclub while trying to outrun death. I’m sure there are Eastern religious implications to this; to my Western Christian eyes, his denial in the face of mortality—as well as a surreal dream sequence in which he confronts his own corpse—gives Drunken Angel significant Ash Wednesday resonance.
(2/15/2026)
