by Douglas Messerli
Akira Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uegusa (screenplay), Akira Kurosawa (director) 醉いどれ天使 (Yoidore tenshi) (Drunken Angel) / 1948, USA 1959
For Sanada there
is no appeasing of his patients, no quiet assurances, only outright statements
of Matsunaga’s stupidity and bluff. Sanada knows his territory, and has no
sufferance for the half-lies and appeasements of more successful doctors, which
he also knows will have no effect on the rough-hewn toughs he must face. Time
and again throughout The Drunken Angel,
Sanada and Matsunaga go at it with fists and flying objects. Their disgust with
one another is as palpable as their eventual love. In this world of masculine
(and one might add, feminine) stereotypes Sanada demands impossible absolutes:
“no alcohol, no women,” while he himself visits nearly every bar in the
territory, flirting with the accessible women: “Fall in love for someone like
me,” he consuls a woman behind the bar who later tries to lure Matsunaga into
the country, “I may be scrubby but you get free medical care.” Sanada is also
hiding a young woman in his office-home who serves him as a kind of nurse, Miyo
(Chieko Nakakita), the former lover of the now-imprisoned former gang boss,
Okada (Reizaburo Yamamoto). Miyo, who has suffered abuse and VD from her former
lover, is terrified of Okada’s release, but is also still drawn to the yakuza,
a fact that equally angers Sanada, who mutters (in one of his numerous cynical
asides) “Martyrdom is out of style.” Later he puts it more bluntly: “He
tormented you, made you sick, and then deserted you like a puppy. And you still
wag your tail and follow him.”
The intimate scene that follows, in which Sanada visits his patient in the apartment where Matsunaga has lived with his fickle mistress, is one of the most touching in the movie, as the gangster, lying in a fever upon the bed, is watched over by his “angel,” who in clumsy curiosity opens the woman’s jewel box, smells her perfume, and plays with her shadow-puppets, as the director reveals this gruff and forbidding lector as still a very human man, curious, if nothing else, to know what it might be like to be Matsunaga’s lover. And I am not the only viewer who might describe Sanada’s attempt to care for and reform Matsunaga as representing a kind of queer love, a love returned, in kind, by the ailing yakuza, who gives up his life to protect the doctor. In his “film Odyssey,” Robert Taylor muses:
“What if our bachelor Sanada is really in love with
Matsunga? …And Kurosawa does some very interesting things with the doctor’s
character that hint toward homosexuality. He’s single and, though he warns
others to stay away from his live-in nurse, shows no affection for her in a way
other than paternal. He jokes with a good looking bartender that she should
marry him, and then bursts out laughing before he can even finish the thought.”
Later, the same
music box is opened by Nanae, as she attempts to collect her jewels, along with
her dresses, shoes, and other attire in her escape from her love-nest with
Matsunaga—who is now an outcast both from the society (for his contractible
disease) and from his gangland world. Like Miyo before him, Matsunaga now has
nowhere to go but to the doctor’s house.
Yet that very
move further ostracizes him from his Yakuza crime associates and further
endangers Miyo’s life as Matsunaga’s former lackeys recognize her as Okada’s
former lover. When Okada and his men finally arrive to claim her, the doctor
once again fearlessly stands his ground, refusing to allow them access. But
when Matsunaga hears that he intends, the next day, to call for the police, he
is determined, despite his illness, to warn the head boss, with whom he feels
he still has some personal influence.
Kurosawa
intentionally plays out that attempted murder in a long series of melodramatic
fight scenes as each corners his enemy ready for the final plunge of the knife,
before beginning again and again, and finally ending in a kind of comic
pratfall of the two as they slip upon a can of paint in the hallway, one by one
attempting to grasp their way to safety through the slippery substance. It is
almost as if the director were exploring all the conventions of Hollywood
murders in a few clips. But just as one is ready to begin laughing, Okado puts
the knife in Matsunaga’s back, ending his life.
As Taylor reminds
us, that in the original script, the director had for Sanada paying for Matsunga’s
funeral and truck his coffin through gangland territory to demonstrate that
Matsunga was loved by someone. But the censors refused to permit that soap opera-ish
ending, very similar, in fact, to what happens in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation
of Life of a decade later, 1959, the same year in which Kurosawa’s film was
finally released in the US.
At film’s
censored end, Sanada has no patience with sentiment or excuses. The world is
what it is, and he is determined, despite the stupidity of groups like the
Yakuza to destroy the vermin that plague these Tokyo citizens, whether they be
bacterial or human filth. His youngest patient comes to tell him that he owes
her a “sweet,” her newest x-ray revealing that she is now free of TB. If he has
lost Matsunaga, his tough love has saved yet another life.
Los Angeles, April 16, 2012 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review.
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