Within Japan, Akira Kurosawa was often accused of pandering to Western arthouse tastes, but Drunken Angel borrows from film noir and neo-realism strictly on its own terms. Just as Roberto Rossellini used naturalism to capture the changes in Italian society during and immediately after World War II, Drunken Angel creates a gritty depiction of the war's aftermath, paving the way for later, more corrosive films like Shohei Imamura's Pigs and Battleships.
Drunken Angel contrasts two characters: Dr. Sanada (Takashi Shimura), a cynical, alcoholic doctor frustrated by the poor neighborhood where he practices, and one of his patients, Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune), a gangster whose hacking cough turns out to be TB. Told to change his lifestyle, Matsunaga continues to drink and womanize, while suffering under the heel of an even-tougher gangster just released from jail.
Kurosawa considered Drunken Angel, his ninth film, to be his breakthrough. In hindsight, it's most noteworthy for its combination of violent action and humanist emotion, a hallmark of much of his work. The film combines styles that shouldn't gel, but miraculously, they do. Drunken Angel presents a vivid cast of characters, but the most memorable one isn't a person. It's the fetid swamp, bathed in murky lighting, around which a post-WWII Tokyo slum self-destructs. The film could have been a pat tale of redemption, but Kurosawa leaves its allegorical dimensions — implicitly, it compares women's willingness to degrade themselves for gangsters to Japanese kamikaze pilots — wide open and keeps his sentimental streak at bay. — Steve Erickson
DVD EXTRAS: A commentary by Donald Richie, a scholar of Japanese cinema, and two documentaries about the making of Drunken Angel. Akira Kurosawa: It is Wonderful to Create examines Kurosawa's collaborative process. Kurosawa and the Censors is an informative but dry illustrated lecture by Danish scholar Lars-Martin Sorensen, which shows how Drunken Angel managed to criticize the American occupation of Japan without directly depicting it.
