Thank heaven for the much awaited Criterion DVD of Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948). “Much awaited” for this being the first of the Kurosawa films to feature Toshirô Mifune, and the first to feature Mifune acting the young hothead to Takashi Shimura’s sensei figure.
I swear, I totally was rooting for Mifune’s tubercular character Matsunaga, to really make a break from the yakuza scene, culture, way of life, and in doing so, heal himself. I don’t know that he was made to be a morally conflicted thus sympathetic character, so I am thinking it was in his apparent self-destruction, anxiety (as evidenced by that dream sequence of his dead self chasing his beautiful self through ocean waves, and which actually reminded us of the video for The Cure’s “Close to Me”), and his being rather pathetic, flailing around drunk and flying off the handle in violent fits, becoming increasingly sallow and coughing up blood when he should be winning a knife fight.
