Drunken Angel

In this powerful early noir from the great Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune bursts onto the screen as a volatile, tubercular criminal who strikes up an unlikely relationship with Takashi Shimura's jaded physician. Set in and around the muddy swamps and back alleys of postwar Tokyo, Drunken Angel is an evocative, moody snapshot of a treacherous time and place, featuring one of the director's most memorably violent climaxes.

Japan
1948
98 minutes
Black & White
1.33:1
Japanese
Spine #413

Special Features

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

Restored high-definition digital transfer
Audio commentary featuring Japanese-film scholar Donald Richie
Documentary on the making of Drunken Angel, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create
Kurosawa and the Censors, a video piece that looks at the challenges Kurosawa faced in making Drunken Angel
PLUS: An essay by cultural historian Ian Buruma and excerpts from Kurosawa’s Something Like an Autobiography

Cover by Jock

DVD 1 Disc $31.96 SRP: $39.95

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

AK 100: 25 Films by Kurosawa

DVD Box Set

25 Discs

$319.00

Out Of Print

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

Restored high-definition digital transfer
Audio commentary featuring Japanese-film scholar Donald Richie
Documentary on the making of Drunken Angel, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create
Kurosawa and the Censors, a video piece that looks at the challenges Kurosawa faced in making Drunken Angel
PLUS: An essay by cultural historian Ian Buruma and excerpts from Kurosawa’s Something Like an Autobiography

Cover by Jock

Cast & Credits

Cast

Takashi Shimura: Doctor Sanada
Toshiro Mifune: Matsunaga
Reizaburo Yamamoto: Okada
Michiyo Kogure: Nanae
Chieko Nakakita: Nurse Miyo

Credits

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Producer: Sojiro Motoki
Screenplay: Keinosuke Uekusa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Editing: Akikazu Kono
Cinematography: Takeo Ito
Lighting: Kinzo Yoshizawa
Music: Fumio Hayasaka

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Toshiro Mifune

Actor

Akira Kurosawa once said, “The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression. Toshiro Mifune needed only three feet.” The filmmaker certainly gave Mifune a lot of space, however: over the course of sixteen collaborations, the actor and the director created some of the most dynamic characters ever put on-screen, all marked by an intense physicality and a surprising tenderness. Kurosawa first took note of the handsome actor when Mifune was twenty-seven, during an open audition at Toho Studios; he was soon cast in Snow Trail (1947), a film Kurosawa wrote for director Senkichi Taniguchi. Just one year later, Kurosawa gave him the lead in Drunken Angel as a consumptive gangster. Mifune proceeded to inhabit a variety of deeply felt roles for Kurosawa, including an artist hounded by paparazzi (Scandal); a bandit who may or not be a rapist and murderer (Rashomon); a loose cannon ronin who reluctantly protects a village (Seven Samurai); an elderly patriarch terrified of a second nuclear attack (I Live in Fear); and, probably most iconically, the wily, shiftless samurai Yojimbo. Mifune is known for more than his work with Kurosawa; see him in Hiroshi Inagaki’s Oscar-winning Samurai Trilogy and Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion. But it is Kurosawa’s greatest films that are most unimaginable without Mifune’s bravado streaking across them like lightning. The pair parted ways professionally in 1965.