Non Samurai Guy 2: Stray Angel, Drunken Dog.

Hello everyone, the last Non Samurai Guy went down such a storm that I think I'll do others. Luckily for you, these will be more brief and include more saucy pictures. Kurosawa is a master, and so there are bits in every movie which are worth checking out, so I'll just give brief thoughts to allow you to inform your decisions on which box sets you should purchase. What follows is two reviews of films I've seen. They include one sentence plot synopsis and then thoughts: today we have Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, two movies often linked together because of their similarity in subject (namely the seedy underclass which developed in post War Japan) and the fact that they were made within a year or two of each other.

Drunken Angel [1948]

No Joke, these movie posters kick ass [source]

Synopsis: An alcoholic Doctor (Shimamura) - a Drunken Angel, if you will - and a young Gangster (Mifune) bicker over their respctive life choices when the gangster is found to have Tuberculosis.

Review: the movie which Kurosawa says was his first film, and it shows it. This is a more tightly scripted tightly filmed piece of work than his previous movie, One Wonderful Sunday (which I'm not going to review). The movie offers a social critique of post-war Japan, the Doctor lives next to a cesspit which is infecting the rest of the people living near it. Despite doing his best (and he is shown to be dedicated to his job) he is still mocked for being an alcoholic by the local children.

Though, to be honest, most cesspools aren't as reflective as this.

  The movie also affords Kurosawa some surreptitious criticism of the American occupation. The Gangsters hang out in dance halls where they listen to Jazz and drink Western style booze, the result is a very un-Japanese debauchery. As well as the newly Westernised dancing girls, and gangsters molls dressed in Western clothing, this would have been understood as indictments of the corruption and avarice that American occupation forces were having on Japanese society. As a gangster, Mifune is captivating. His heavy drinking, dancing and gambling symbolic of the life he leads. His appearances at Shimamuras, usually when both he and the Dr. are drunk, wreak of malice and underlying violence. Mifune is malevolent and unpredictable, like a wild animal: the two resort to physical violence most meetings. 

Here they are fighting.

And here Mifune is dancing up a storm.

  Drunken Angel also offers criticism of the Yakuza gangs which have taken influence in post war Japan. They are depicted as common thugs and idiots. The fact that the imprisoned Gang leaders moll is now the doctor's assistant shows that their influence is invasive. When the gang leader returns, his tune on the guitar is haunting and a musical cue which reminds Mifune that he has outlived his usefulness, and that his illness is a sign of weakness to other gangs. He is to be replaced without honour.

Although he has to gamble his wealth away first. He's a decadent dude in this movie.

The most memorable scenes include Mifune's dance, the first time that the gang-leader plays his tune on the guitar, and a scene on the beach, from a hallucinating Mifune, which recalls the Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari:

He's being chased by himself, an apt metaphor for tuberculosis.

Throughout the movie, Mifune gets physically weaker and yet more stubborn. He continues to drink, gamble and fight, to his own detriment. After a final battle scene, which shows merely how entrenched the new gangster culture is in Post-War Japan, the movie ends on a downer, with life going on after Mifune dies needlessly. Mifune's potential wife and the Doctor both try to continue with their lives.

Stray Dog [1949]

This one is perhaps a little gaudy, they all look ill. Shimamura looks like a zombie. [source]

Synopsis: Toshiro Mifune is a policeman, who alongside grizzled older detective Shimamura, travels through a sweltering Post-War Tokyo to recover his stolen gun, which has been used in murders throughout the city.

Review: This is another movie perhaps more interesting for its setting than its story. Post-war Tokyo is struggling along through a heat-wave, and we get a good look at its sweaty body. As a result, the movie is perhaps a little overlong: the two chase scenes at the beginning of the movie, and another at the conclusion, go on collectively about ten minutes too long, no matter how interesting the scenery.

Mifune, who is sprinting in at least ten minutes of the movie, he's quite a man...

Similarly, Mifune's initial detective work, disguised as a soldier, as he negotiates the black market is interesting from a social perspective (namely how Tokyo was recovering after devastation in WWII), but the scene really saps momentum from the plot.

...And he wears the hell out of a grubby army outfit.

Mifune is teamed later with Takashi Shimamura, another of Kurosawa's stalwart's, most recognisable as the leader of the Seven Samurai. The two detectives have differing styles. Shimamura, the more grizzled of the two, believes in a distinction between good and bad, there's very little moral ambiguity for him. Mifune however, is more brash, and has been directly affected by his service in the war, he believes that circumstances make people bad, and the situation that Japan has found itself in isn't conducive for good people. His belief in a shared goodness of humanity is matched through his own changing circumstances: desperate people will do desperate things, and in searching for his gun, Mifune has become desperate himself.

The two guys have a beer and a chat about life, morality, and when Metallica started sucking.

Meanwhile the female character can be seen as a physical embodiment of the complexities of Post-War Japan, she dances in a Western-style Dancehall, and has even begun to act 'Western'. The increasing influence of the West can also be seen through both through the Western-style house of one of the murder victims, and the baseball match where the gun dealer is tricked and arrested. The two teams have English names (the Giants and the Hawks.)

Baseball, zzz...

In conclusion, it's a charming, gripping movie which is slightly overlong but important from a social perspective. Of course, Mifune and Shimamura are excellent. Furthermore, as well as the interesting social and political undertones, the story also works very well as a straight forward police thriller. The conclusion, a shootout in a field with the killer Yusa, played by Isao Kimura, whom we've already mentioned in regards to Lone Wolf and Cub, is tense and absorbing. The distress that Yusa is in, and the fact that we have seen his pitiful house, makes him a strangley sympathetic murderer. The showdown is accompanied by the piano playing of a woman in a nearby house, and adds a surreal edge, and also hints at the increasing influence of the West into Japanese culture.

The one guy with the gun loses, what a loser.

The final conclusion suggests that Imamura has changed his views to closer match Mifunes. The movie is definitely worth seeing. On a tangent I disagree with is a female friend of mine, who argues that the losing of the gun is symbolic of Freudian deprivation, and that his quest for the gun is his search for his libido. This is nonsense, he is guilty because he lost his gun, and feels worse because it was used to kill people, that's all.