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Drunken Angel is a 1948 Kurosawa movie starring Takashi Shimura as an alcoholic doctor in postwar Japan who treats a young, small-time hood named Matsunaga (Toshirō Mifune), after a gunfight with a rival syndicate. The doctor diagnoses the young gangster with tuberculosis, and convinces him to begin treatment for it. The two enjoy an uneasy friendship until the gangster’s former boss is released from prison and seeks to take his gang over once again. The sick young man then stops following the doctor’s advice, slips back into old habits and threatens to kill him, while his life is further endangered by his gangster lifestyle.

Kurosawa considered the film to be the first that he was able to direct without interference from government. The film showed Japanese audiences the seamy underworld (Yakuza) of Japanese society for the first time. It was also unusual because the star was an anti-hero. Toshirō Mifune’s experience in the Japanese army was so recent that he looked the role of a man emaciated from tuberculosis. Although Mifune would go on to become Kurosawa’s most popular star, and one of Japan’s iconic leading men in film, it was Takashi Shimura who gave Kurosawa a wide range of dramatic performances for films such as Ikiru, Rashomon, and Seven Samurai.

In Drunken Angel, the doctor plays an unsympathetic character to balance the audience’s natural affection for doctors against its natural distrust of underworld gangsters. For the film to work the audience must sympathize with the gangster caught in a struggle between his negative lifestyle and his own physical health, which was something new and altogether different for citizens of wartime Japan. At close of the film, Kurosawa blends together the action of a gangster film with the struggle of the individual to break free of his destructive lifestyle.

As he was forced to do on previous occasions, Matsunaga must flee — this time from a fight when his progressive illness overcomes him. In his attempt to flee both he and his foe are covered in white paint as they struggle on the floor of an apartment hallway. Matsunaga breaks free but receives a fatal wound just as he bursts through a doorway that symbolizes his escape from his gangster life. Kurosawa uses both dramatic technique from Mifune with new camera angles and musical scoring to highlight the end of Matsunaga’s struggle. The film’s denouement shows the doctor refusing to allow himself to mourn the death of his patient.

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