Film: Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi)

February 16, 1999

Film: Drunken Angel (Yoidore Tenshi)
Director: Akira Kurosawa. (1948, 98 min.)
With Takashi Shimura,  Toshiro Mifune, Michiyo Kogure, Reizaburo Yamamoto, Noriko Sengoku,  and Eitaro Shindo
Miller Theatre, Columbia University (116th St. & Broadway)
6:00 PM

A dedicated doctor confronts both his own alcoholism and the sinister underworld as he tries to rehabilitate a young gangster. Working with Toshiro Mifune for the first time, Kurosawa later wrote: “…I could not restrain the overpowering force of Mifune’s acting. The doctor was supposed to be the film’s hero, but what a shame it would have been to stifle Mifune’s vitality.  He reacts so swiftly to direction: if I say one thing, he understands ten. I decided to turn him loose in this film…” Drunken Angel captures perfectly the spirit of postwar Japan: a society in ruins, full of fears and hopes, virtue faced with degradation, idealism with the gloom of reality.

Film: Rashomon
Director: Akira Kurosawa. (1950, 88 min.)
With Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo,  Masayuki Mori, and Takashi Shimura
Miller Theatre, Columbia University (116th St. & Broadway)
8:30 PM
Kurosawa’s Oscar-winning film statement on the relativity (or unknowability) of Truth. A crime is witnessed by four individuals, and each later presents a version of the facts that is colored by self-interest and deception. Winning the Grand Prize of the Venice Film Festival, Rashomon was the film that introduced Western critics both to a brilliant new director and to a national cinema of great artistry and sophistication.
Part of “Kurosawa Remembered” Film Series