Dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1965, 186 mins, subtitled

Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Yuzu Kayama, Reiko Dan, Tsotumu Yamazaki

Review by Colin Dibben

Red Beard is minor Kurosawa: dour and overwrought. It is also one of his most Hollywood styled films. It comes across like a stodgy American ‘issues’ film from the 1950s, veering well into melodrama, something that Elia Kazan might have churned out.

In 19th century Japan, Dr Niide (Mifune) – known to all as Red Beard – runs a charitable rural clinic. When an ambitious young doctor, Yasumoto (Kayama) arrives to help, Red Beard becomes his mentor, teaching him the real meaning of caring and curing.

Akira Kurosawa is one of the (at least) four greatest film makers from the Golden Age of Japanese cinema. His 1950 film Rashomon introduced Japanese cinema to the wider world – apparently before then the country was hardly represented internationally, even at film festivals.

Red Beard was an epic undertaking and the most expensive film made in Japan up until then. But both lead actor Mifune and the director swore never to work with each other again after this production. Unfortunately, neither the money nor the creative tension between star and star director make much of a difference to the film.

The slight, meandering storyline would work well given a bit more of a ‘slow cinema’ angle – but that isn’t what Kurosawa is about. This is proper old-fashioned story-telling and all the sub-plots feed back way too nicely into the main story and its themes.

Mifune is always watchable; here he stays relatively muted and pensive. But almost everything else is overwrought, from the constantly caterwauling poor patients to the set-piece recreation of an earthquake. Kurosawa makes statements about historical social injustices with all the subtlety of a medieval trepanner. And the suggestion that these issues can be dealt with by the presence of a few more avuncular physicians is pretty laughable.

Red Beard made me celebrate how many other excellent historical Japanese films we have been able to see in the UK over the last 20 years or so. We no longer have to keep recommending Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse to others – there are a plethora of movies out there taking a more interesting look at Japan’s 19th century and earlier too.

Red Beard is nicely filmed and presented here in a 2K version that looks better than that sounds. If you like things stately, it is worth a view, but Kurosawa’s Hollywood influenced shtick – I am thinking of the finely tuned melodrama mode rather than any direct visual influences from, say, John Ford – is starting to look dated. He didn’t really get his mojo back until he embraced more traditional Japanese performance styles in 1980’s Kagemusha.

Extras on the Blu-ray include:

Audio commentary by filmmaker Kenta McGrath
Akira Kurosawa: It is Wonderful to Create – Red Beard (2002, 22 mins): created as part of the Toho Masterworks series and featuring interviews with Kurosawa, actors Yoshio Tsuchiya and Kyoko Kagawa, art director Yoshiro Muraki and others
Introduction by Alex Cox (2003, 14 mins)
Toshiro Mifune in Conversation (1986, 61 mins, audio only): the actor discusses his life and career with critic and writer David Shipman, recorded at the NFT
District Nurse (1952, 27 mins): a public information film by Sarah Erulkar made to promote Britain’s new National Health Service to overseas audiences – and to encourage applications to the nursing profession
Doctor’s Dilemma (1948, 1 min): this public information trailer hammers home the urgency of citizens playing their part in time for the launch of the NHS
Mother (1947, 16 mins): a social worker in India is the face of modern childbirth in this United Nations-sponsored educational film by Paul Zils