Red Beard

• 1. Introduction

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  Red Beard is a 1965 Japanese period drama that marked the end of one of cinema's most celebrated partnerships. Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune had made 16 films together. This would be the last. The film tells the story of a young, arrogant doctor assigned to a humble clinic in Edo against his will, and the gruff physician who quietly reshapes his understanding of what medicine is for. But behind the screen, something was quietly fracturing. The production would stretch two full years. Mifune would turn down television and film offers he could not afford to lose. And when it was over, the two men would never work together again. How did a film about compassion and humanism become the thing that drove two great collaborators apart? And why, despite that rupture, did critics call it one of Kurosawa's finest works?

• 2. A Chance Discovery

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  After finishing High and Low in 1963, Kurosawa accidentally picked up a copy of Shūgorō Yamamoto's 1959 short story collection, Akahige Shinryōtan. He had not sought it out. His first instinct was that it would make a good script for fellow director Hiromichi Horikawa. Then he kept reading. By the time he finished, he knew he would direct it himself. Kurosawa completed a screenplay by early July 1963, working alongside co-writers Masato Ide, Hideo Oguni, and Ryūzō Kikushima. He was candid that the script diverged sharply from Yamamoto's source material. The most significant addition was a young girl rescued from a brothel, a character not present in the novel at all. For that figure, Kurosawa drew directly from Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Humiliated and Insulted, modeling her on Nellie, a character Dostoevsky used to illuminate suffering and grace. The film's principal photography began on the 21st of December, 1963.

• 3. Building an Entire World

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  Film historian Donald Richie described the main set as an entire town, complete with back alleys and side streets, some of which were never once captured on film. That detail tells you something about the seriousness of the undertaking. The tiled roofs came from buildings more than a century old. The lumber was drawn from the oldest available farmhouses. Costumes and props were aged for months before a single frame was shot. The bedding, sewn in Tokugawa-period patterns, was actually slept in for up to half a year before it appeared on screen. The main gate was built from wood over a hundred years old, and after filming wrapped, it was re-erected at the entrance to the theater that hosted Red Beard's premiere. Richie noted that one could argue Kurosawa "completely wasted his million yen set," since the main street appears on screen for only one minute, though its destruction was folded into an earthquake sequence. The bridges and elaborately built paddy fields also appear briefly. Yet during the two years it took to complete the film, tourist bus companies ran tours through the set.

• 4. The Rupture with Mifune

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  Toshiro Mifune had been Kurosawa's collaborator since the late 1940s, their partnership stretching across 16 films. The production of Red Beard did not end that partnership with a fight. It ended it with exhaustion. Principal photography began in December 1963 and wrapped two years later. Kurosawa fell ill twice during that stretch. Mifune fell ill once, as did co-star Yūzō Kayama. For Mifune, the toll was professional as much as physical. Kurosawa's increasingly long production schedules forced the actor to turn down too many offers from television and other film projects. After Red Beard finished, Mifune would never work with Kurosawa again. The two had built something remarkable together across those 16 collaborations. But the very ambition that made Red Beard possible was the thing that made continuing impossible.

• 5. Humanism on Screen

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  The story unfolds in Koishikawa, a district of Edo, toward the close of the Tokugawa period. Dr. Noboru Yasumoto arrives at a rural clinic having trained at a Dutch medical school in Nagasaki. He expects a short stay on his way to becoming personal physician to the Shogunate. He refuses to wear his uniform, disdains the food, and enters a forbidden garden where he encounters a mysterious patient called "The Mantis," a madwoman only the clinic's director, Dr. Kyojō Niide, can treat. Niide, nicknamed Red Beard, carries a gruff exterior over a core of deep compassion. Over the course of the film, Yasumoto is drawn into the lives of patients whose stories carry the film's moral weight: Rokusuke, a dying man whose secret grief is only revealed when his daughter appears; Sahachi, a generous neighbor whose wife, discovered dead after a landslide, had secretly asked him to hold her tighter while she pressed a knife to herself. These are not melodramatic distractions. They are the film's argument, rendered in human terms, for why medicine in service of the poor matters. A few critics have noted the film's kinship with Kurosawa's earlier Ikiru, another story in which a man comes to understand his work through proximity to suffering.

• 6. Reception and Legacy

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  Red Beard opened to highly positive reviews in Japan. The Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo named it the best film of its year. The film was also one of the highest-grossing Japanese releases of 1965. In France, a 1978 theatrical release sold 200,402 tickets. Western audiences were cooler. The film performed poorly abroad at the time of its release, and critical reception outside Japan was mixed. Toho International brought it to United States theaters in January 1966 with English subtitles; Frank Lee International reissued it in December 1968. Roger Ebert, reviewing it on the 26th of December, 1969, gave it four stars and wrote that the film was "assembled with the complexity and depth of a good 19th century novel." Michael Sragow of The New Yorker, writing years later, called it "a masterpiece" while acknowledging that it was often dismissed as a soap opera. At the 26th Venice International Film Festival in 1965, Mifune won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. The film was also nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. It is Kurosawa's last black-and-white film, and the first to use a magnetic 4-track stereo soundtrack, shot at an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 according to Stephen Prince's audio commentary on the Criterion Collection's 2002 DVD. In 2015, it was screened at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, fifty years after its premiere.