Barberousse

It is common knowledge that many things changed for Kurosawa after this film. A breakdown, the loss of working friendship with Mifune, funding difficulties...etc...but with all the changes that followed the completion of Red Beard, while watching I couldn't help notice that everything was ironically in bloom. Akira Kurosawa's direction was never better, Mifune never acted better and at it's core Red Beard tells a story borrowed heavily form Dostoevsky, thus making this a labour of love. This film is flawless in many respects, if you're a film student, such as myself, you can take everything and pick it apart and find...The story is a simple one, a wise and determined doctor impresses a young ambitious doctor into learning what humanity is and how it exists all around us and that without it we are nothing. It tells of humanity through children and adults and the lowest depths of human existence. Some have argued the subject was a little too heavy handed but Kurosawa has always maintained that sometimes heavy handedness is needed especially for those who don't get it with a slap. In my opinion, there are periods in every artists career when they are at their best. Miles Davis was at his best before his breakdown, but the breakdown was bound to happen after creating and giving so much. I feel this is what happened to Kurosawa, he gave all that he could give and with this film, if you truly study it and study it well, (the DVD version comes with an exceptional commentary) you will find that this is one of the most finely crafted films in cinematic history, in fact as far as direction goes, it is difficult for me to think of one better directed. Fellini's best, Ozu's best, Coppola's best, Welles' best, Antonioni, Visconti, De Sica, Goddard, Renoir, Melville, Erice, you name it, watch their best with the sound off take note of the direction then compare it with RED BEARD. You will be left breathless. Kurosawa is a GREAT among the GREATS. This is visual poetry. Kurosawa's great directorial swan song. Bittersweet, for after RED BEARD something within Akira profoundly changed.

This was the sixth Kurosawa film I ever saw, in a film-viewing binge that began with Seven Samurai and has yet to satiate me. It did, however, mark a turning point for me as it did for him.

Up to then, I had only seen the B&W Samurai classics of the 50s and early 60s. The must-sees: not just Seven Samurai, but Yojimbo and Throne of Blood. The under-appreciated Sanjuro, and the light but enduring Hidden Fortress. This was my first non-samurai film from him. What I did not realise until later was that it was his career apotheosis.

Red Beard is not Kurosawa's best film. Yet when it came out, it was a phenomenon much like Titanic 30 years later. It broke the bank, it was an exercise in unprecedented creative and financial power by a major filmmaker, and it appealed to filmgoers like few filmes before or since. Kurosawa built a hospice and miniature village for his characters to inhabit, and this episodic story of a young star doctor discovering a vocation among the poor under the gruff "red beard" (Mifune) feels all the more authentic for it. It is a film of such deliberate ease and confidence that it could only be made by this director, at this point in his career. It could not be anything less than the fullest exploration of his most cherished themes - social injustice, the redemptive power of human kindness, personal codes. It could also do nothing but foreshadow his decline.

That's a lot of expectation to pile onto the unsuspecting viewer, so what do you get during those 3 hours? You get a first-class drama, Mifune's finest performance, and one of the most beautiful tear-jerkers ever to grace a screen. All the while, countless instances of technical brilliance remind you why this film could only be made by this director: a surgery covered in nothing but an extended closeup of the young doctor, an eerie seduction covered in an almost static, dreamlike wide shot, and, halfway through, the ass-kicking of a life-time and its touching follow-up.

This is an extinct form of filmmaking, one preserved in the ember of its stark black-and-white film stock. The cinematic equivalent of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton: there are ways in which you won't relate, but it is daunting, powerful, and a journey into an intriguing other world well worth spending 3 hours in, and then some.

In the Nineteenth Century, in Japan, the arrogant and proud just-graduated Dr. Noboru Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama) is forced to work in the Koshikawa Clinic, a non-profit health facility ruled by Dr. Kyojio Niide (Toshirô Mifune), a.k.a. "Red Beard". "Red Beard" is a good, sentimental, but also very firm, strong and fair man. While in the clinic, Dr. Yasumoto becomes responsible for healing the hurt teenager Otoyo (Terumi Niki), and he learns a lesson of humanity, becoming a better man.

"Akahige" is another magnificent work of Master Akira Kurosawa. The touching and low-paced story is very beautiful, and shows the redemption of a spoiled man that becomes a human being, learning important and worthwhile values of life. It is almost impossible to highlight one individual performance in such a spectacular cast, but Toshirô Mifune shows his versatility in the role of the good "Red Beard". The 185 running time, with intermission, does not make any part of this interesting story boring, and this film is highly recommended for any sensitive audience. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "O Barba Ruiva" ("The Red Beard")

Akira Kurosawa said about the film, "I had something special in mind when I made this film because I wanted to make something that my audience would want to see it, something so magnificent that people would just have to see it." Humanistic and compassionate, the film tells the story of a young doctor who after graduation from the Dutch Medical School in Nagasaki hopes to become a member of the court medical staff but instead has to take a post as an intern at a Public Clinic for the impoverished patients. The clinic is run by Dr. Nide (Toshiro Mifune) whom the destitute patients call "Red Beard". The long and difficult journey awaits the young doctor – from the initial shock and denial to work at the clinic, to learning how to understand his patients, care for them s and see the humans in them. Kurosawa describes the film, one of his directorial pinnacles as a "monument to the goodness in man". It also can be called a monument to his talent and humanism.

"Red Beard" is the noble conclusion to Kurosawa's monochrome period which undoubtedly contained his finest work. Although there were beautifully choreographed action scenes still to come in "Kagemusha" and "Ran", nothing was quite the same after this quiet meditation on the stirrings of humanity in a dark and otherwise uncaring world. The period is early 19th century, the place a hospital for the socially impoverished run by a doctor who manages to combine idealism and pragmatism, the two essential ingredients needed to facilitate the emergence of enlightenment. Although the great Toshiro Mifune dominates the film as the hospital head, it is the effect of his presence on the young doctor who pays him a visit that is the main theme of the narrative. Yasumoto, selfish and ambitious, has no intention to begin with of devoting his services to the hospital but one by one his defences collapse as he learns from the example of an idealist who has shed all vestiges of selfishness. There are constant reminders that medicine was at a rudimentary stage in its development and of the dedication needed by pioneers at a time when most answers still remained unknown and everything was largely a matter of easing rather than curing. I would not claim that "Red Beard" is among Kurosawa's half dozen greatest works. At just over three hours it sprawls in a discursive way. A lengthy flashback of a dying patient's reasons for seeking a form of absolution rather impedes the narrative flow in spite of some impressive visuals of snowscapes and an earthquake. But then the structure of the whole film rather has the episodic quality of a soap opera where momentum is maintained by proceeding from one crisis to another. Nevertheless it is full of wonderfully contrasted sequences from the knockabout humour of Mifune applying his medical skills to warding off a group of assailants by breaking their limbs like matchsticks to the tender scene of the young doctor being nursed back from sickness by the girl rescued from enslavement in a brothel. And then there is the rain. Where would a Kurosawa film be without those torrential downpours to remind us of the physical discomfiture that a journey towards enlightenment entails.