"Drunken Angel - Criterion Collection" (Akira Kurosawa)
Since we were just talking about this film, in our ineffable manner...
This 1948 film by Akira Kurosawa is his first to feel solidly like a Kurosawa movie; not coincidentally, it was also his first collaboration as a director with the young actor Toshiro Mifune, who would go on to bring his characteristic explosive temper and brooding physical presence to Kurosawa masterworks like “Seven Samurai” and “Yojimbo.”
Here he’s a skinny young yakuza who swaggers around his territory — a slum with a symbolic body of polluted water at its center — sporting a wide-shouldered suit and a striped tie that the character seems to have copied from an American gangster film. When he pays a midnight visit to a clinic operated by an idealistic and alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura, Kurosawa’s other great star), the doctor discovers that the young gangster has an advanced case of tuberculosis, and tries to persuade him to shape up and care for himself.
[Click to read more re New DVDs - New York Times]
Shipping estimate: November 27, 2007.
