Drunken Angel

Criterion Collection, $39.95

“I tell this actor Mifune one thing, and he gives me back 100,” poker-faces Akira Kurosawa in one of two featurettes for Drunken Angel. “He already knows what to do.” In his 1948 debut for the immortal Japanese film director, the lean, mean, late-twentysomething ex-Army pilot son of a photographer unleashes a naked rage that anticipates James Dean by a half-dozen years. The pair’s immediate follow-up, Stray Dog, seconds that emotion same as back-to-backers Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden. Toshirô Mifune, unbound. Even though Drunken Angel was Kurosawa’s seventh directorial effort, he referred to it ever after as his “first film” – liberation, more or less, from studio and U.S.-occupation censorship. As another (and long-accepted) film parallel posits, once Kurosawa found the John Wayne to his John Ford, his vehicles never suffered for a stagecoach driver to lash the beasts home. Mifune ate raw 16 Kurosawa epics, the last, 1965’s benevolent Red Beard, reversing lead duties with the first. Rather than Beard‘s barely bound physician, Mifune’s rabid yakuza here goes mushroom cloud when Kurosawa’s other favorite leading man, Takashi Shimuri (as Drunken Angel Dr. Sanada), diagnoses the gangster with tuberculosis. (Don’t-miss audio commentary by Kurosawa scholar and former U.S.-occupation forces typist Donald Richie contextualizing the social stigma of TB.) From that opening scene, the two men then wrestle each other and their singular fate in the film’s postholocaust sump. Mifune gives back a thousandfold.

Also Out Now

The Threepenny Opera (Criterion Collection, $39.95): Turn a nose up to disc two’s milquetoast French translation of Weill & Brecht, filmed by and simultaneously to G.W. Pabst’s miraculously preserved 1931 German master class in primal cinema. Mackie Messer (Rudy Forster) and Jenny (Lotte Lenya) – knives out.

The Lady Vanishes (Criterion Collection, $39.95): Hitch(cock)’s 1938 romantic thriller in a double-disc set that matches titular heroine Dame May Whitty’s infinitely endearing charm to a shocking impreciseness the director didn’t overcome until 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt.

This article appears in December 7 • 2007.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.