Kurosawa describes this film in the Dostoyevsky manner as an “allegory of post-war Japanese Society”: Takashi Shimura plays a doctor who tries to bring about the spiritual and physical recovery of the human debris who live in the ashes of a poor quarter of Tokyo immediately after the war; Toshiro Mifune is strikingly effective as an uprooted petty gambler and black-marketeer. In its dynamic visual style, its quivering realism, its expression of a deeply philosophic outlook, Drunken Angel ranks with the best-known of Kurosawa's later classics and provides interesting comparisons to his later Red Beard, whose hero is also a doctor.

Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi) is repeated on Wednesday, April 18.