Drunken Angel

Drunken Angel is Akira Kurosawa's first film with longtime collaborator Toshiro Mifune, the legendary Japanese actor who appeared in 16 of Kurosawa's films between 1948 and 1965, along with another 160-plus films in his long career. 

Here, Mifune plays a gangster who has taken over some territory in postwar Tokyo while the real boss, Okada, is away in prison.  Mifune's character is all bravado; he suffers from tuberculosis, one of myriad diseases to strike postwar Japan.  Kurosawa's tackling the issues of the time is a brave move that elevates this picture from your standard noir exercise to film art, and for these reasons, the film is widely considered Kurosawa's breakthrough piece.

But Mifune is not alone here; his opposite number is a bristly doctor played by Takashi Shimura, who Kurosawa cast in more than 20 films from 1943 to 1980 (yes, I'm looking at the same Wikipedia entry as you; I'm not writing a master's thesis here).  Although the Kurosawa-Mifune collaboration is a bit more widely known, Kurosawa's collaboration with Shimura started earlier and ended later, resulting in more finished films and a much richer legacy.

All trivia aside, what really works for me in Drunken Angel is the writing — at once embedded in the context of postwar Tokyo and presenting characters still relevant in the present day.  Kurosawa and co-writer Keinosuke Uekusa based Mifune's character loosely on a gangster Uekusa knew personally, but the two writers struggled with Shimura's character, fighting to keep the doctor interesting and fully formed rather than a wooden do-gooder whose altruism would bore audiences and ring false.  Only when Uekusa and Kurosawa remembered an alcoholic doctor they both knew in Yokohama did they find the inspiration for Shimura's character here.  They needed a character with flaws rather than someone who exuded plain goodness.

That kind of character development and contrast is essential for storytellers. Yet every day, hundreds of scripts float around Hollywood with exactly this problem.

Kurosawa's films always seem informed by his life experiences, but not so much that his stories were overwhelmed.  Here, he clearly bases his two leads on real people from his life, and in doing so creates two of his strongest characters, possibly the strongest characters he'd created at this point in his career.

I often feel uncreative when I base characters and/or events in my scripts and short stories on real people and experiences. Anybody can write down something that actually happened, right? The real writer is the one who can create from nothingness, right? I then have to remind myself that there is no such thing as "writing from nothingness."

Writing doesn't happen in a vacuum. We write from somewhere; good writers just have the strength of articulation. We don't choose the events, but we do choose the words. Throughout Kurosawa's career, he used real people and experiences as fodder for his work; there's nothing wrong with this. Sometimes these things are truer. But we can't forget the drama and the structure, too.

At about the 45-minute mark, Kurosawa turns to the guitar player who has been plunking away at the same song in the streets at night. Out of the shadows steps an older man who asks to see the guitar. He takes a seat and plays a more complicated tune (well, he mimes playing — the sync is off and so are the placements of his fingers). This is Okada, the boss that Mifune's character has replaced. Just as Mifune's and Shimura's characters have buried the hatchet, a bigger fish arrives (unbeknownst to them) to raise the stakes. That's good writing.

Drunken Angel tackles some issues that you just didn't hear much about in postwar American film.  Although the Japanese couldn't depict the occupying military force at the time (along with several other prickly censorship regulations), in America, you'd be hard-pressed to find a mainstream film from the same time period that openly discusses syphilis and uses profanity.  Drunken Angel does that, and along with depicting characters closely resembling people, places, and a time the writers knew, seems all the more real for doing so.