Red Beard

At first, I thought that Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard could as easily have been entitled ‘Hero Doctors.’ Red Beard is the head of a small charity clinic serving the rural poor in late Tokugawa-Era Japan, just before the Meiji restoration. We see him mostly through the eyes of Dr. Yasumoto, a recent grad on his way up before his exile to this backwater facility, and he is as heroic as can be. He leads his team. He saves lives. He comes up with funding. He does all the things Hero Doctors do.

But there's more going on here than that. Kurosawa understands that the laws of cinema dictate that Yasumoto will come to love the clinic and the people it serves. While he spends enough time on that story to create a binding narrative, he seems much more interested in the lives of the rural poor, their victories and losses and the beliefs that govern their world. Red Beard takes many long detours from Yasumoto’s tale to explore his patients’ lives. This gives the (three hour long) film a sense of pace and place, taking the time to immerse us in an entire community, not just the individual challenges faced by one guy.

Toshiro Mifune, surely one of cinema’s greatest talents, plays the eponymous Red Beard with just the right balance of authority and humanity. Yuzo Kayama does a fine job of getting us on the callow Dr. Yasumoto’s side and walking us through his character’s development. The clinic feels like a real clinic, the people like real people (Ok, we have to overcome the fact that some of the bit players were unwilling to get Tokugawa-era haircuts and went for wigs instead, but big deal – these were contract players, and Toho Studios had many concurrent productions running nearly all the time.), and the village, though it must have been a studio, like a real village.

Don’t be put off by Red Beard’s running time. Treat it like a book: watch a couple of chapters a night and enjoy the experience. Time with Akira Kurosawa is always time well spent.