Kuga, Yoshiko

Drunken Angel - Criterion Collection

Upon its release in 1948, Drunken Angel was hailed in Japan as Akira Kurosawa's directorial breakthrough, comparable to Kubrick's Paths of Glory in the way it catapulted Kurosawa into a higher level of artistic achievement. Kurosawa himself noted, "In this picture I was finally myself. It was my picture. I was doing it and nobody else."

It is indeed an important, vital film, confidently conceived and expertly executed, illuminating themes that would dominate the finest films in Kurosawa's exceptional career. The setting is a rancid, jerry-built section of a postwar city, where a filthy, disease-ridden pond functions as a physical threat and also as the film's central symbol of decay. It's in this hardscrabble environment that a brash young gangster (Toshiro Mifune, in the role that made him a star) visits an alcoholic doctor (Takashi Shimura) to have a bullet removed from his hand. The doctor discovers that the hot-tempered thug is also doomed by tuberculosis, seen here as the physical manifestation of the gangster's moral decay. The doctor is himself diseased by his drinking, and as these clashing men struggle to make some kind of difference in their pathetic lives (spurned by the return from prison of a ruthless yakuza boss), Kurosawa makes unlikely heroes of them both--men who undergo a personal transformation in a vile and violent world.

Drunken Angel is a transitional film for Japanese cinema and especially for Kurosawa; it offers a vivid glimpse of postwar life (both rotten and restoring), and signals the full blossoming of Kurosawa's talent. And while the title role belongs to Shimura (so memorably poignant in Kurosawa's later masterpiece, Ikiru), the film belongs to the forceful presence of Mifune, whose vitality touches nearly every scene of this timeless and powerful drama. --Jeff Shannon

In this powerful early noir from the great Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune bursts onto the screen as a volatile, tuberculosis-infected criminal who strikes up an unlikely, unhealthy relationship with Takashi Shimura s jaded physician. Set in and around the muddy swamps and back alleys of postwar Tokyo, Drunken Angel is an evocative, moody snapshot of a volatile time and place, featuring one of the director s most memorably violent climaxes.

Good Morning - Criterion Collection

By the time he made Good Morning in 1959, Yasujiro Ozu had completely eliminated camera movement from his uniquely simple but elegant directorial style. He chose instead to emphasize static but meticulously purposeful compositions that rarely, if ever, wavered from their recognizable low-angle perspective. In Good Morning, this observational approach is put to sublime use to establish setting (a late-'50s Tokyo suburb) and to view the world through the eyes of the film's central characters—-two young brothers who take a mutual vow of silence to protest their parents' refusal to buy a TV set. Their father claims that television will create "a million idiots," while their mother is angered by the boys' neglect of schoolwork in favor of watching sumo wrestling on a neighbor's TV.

In Ozu's hands, this sublimely simple conflict inspires a comedic exploration of Japan at the dawn of its electronic age, when consumerism and materialism are in vogue, salesmen solicit their wares in constant door-to-door visits, and even the purchase of a washing machine can prompt neighbors into a frenzy of gossipy speculation. Funniest of all are the conspiratorial brothers, who play an amusing variation of "pull my finger" (proving that even great directors can indulge a fart joke if they choose), and employ their silent strategy with the stubbornness that only children can get away with. Through it all, Ozu develops a handful of intermingling themes of love, communication, goodwill, and the changing of societal traditions. Utterly simple on the surface, Good Morning reveals its complexity in careful proportion, with the affectionate humanity that was Ozu's greatest gift. --Jeff Shannon

Ozu's hilarious Technicolor re-working of his silent I Was Born, But. . ., Good Morning (Ohayo) is the story of two young boys in suburban Tokyo who take a vow of silence after their parents refuse to buy them a television set. Shot from the perspective of the petulant brothers, Good Morning is an enchantingly satirical portrait of family life that gives rise to gags about romance, gossip, and the consumerism of modern Japan.

Zero Focus

From Yoshitaro Nomura, the director of The Incident and Castle of Sand, comes the compelling mystery, Zero Focus (Zero no Shoten), in which a young woman hides a dark secret from those around her with devastating consequences. Photographed in moody black and white in near documentary style and based on a bestselling novel by Seicho Matsumoto, one of Japan's most famous mystery writers, Zero Focusis a brooding tale of intrigue and suspense that will hold the viewer spellbound until the final shocking minutes.

Okoge

Drunken Angel

Asian NTSC/All Code DVD. 1948 film directed by Akira Kurosawa. Black & White. 97 minutes. English subtitles.