The Master’s Masterpiece!

For the last 1 year, I had been trying to lay my hands on a DVD of Akira Kurosawa’s 1965 masterpiece Red Beard (Akahige). I had heard a lot of great things about this movie and wanted to see what people meant when they said “It’s Kurosawa’s finest work. Why do I think it’s his best work??? See it and you’ll know why.”

I was naturally thrilled when I heard that Red Beard was a recent addition at the DVD library where I rent movies. This being a new movie to their collection, people were supposed to return the DVD within 1 day, failing which they'd be charged for overtime. I decided that Saturday afternoon would be the right time to rent this film, since the DVD library works only half day on Sunday and I could keep it till Monday afternoon. Every Saturday afternoon, for the last 2 months, I religiously called the DVD library, hoping to reserve it. It was always out.

Lady luck finally smiled at me three Saturdays back. I reserved it on the phone and picked up the DVD right away, thus denying Murphy’s Law the privilege of poking it’s nose into the matter again.

I wanted to watch this movie on a Sunday afternoon, and I did. And I simply loved it.

Here is a gist of the movie:


The young and proud Dr. Noboru Yasumoto is interned at the dilapidated Koshikawa Clinic, where disease, filth and stench are aplenty. The clinic is run by a stern, unbending disciplinarian Dr. Kyojo Niide, nicknamed Akahige (Red Beard) after the reddish color of his beard. Dr. Yasumoto can't stand the place and resorts to disobeying orders and breaking rules so that he is kicked out of there, but all his efforts are in vain. Dr. Niide does not react at all. The movie goes on to show how Dr. Yasumoto changes as a person, how he starts respecting Dr. Niide as a person with genuine compassion for all his patients, how he stops thinking of patients as mere objects and starts respecting them as human beings, and how he starts to like the clinic and gets attached to it, not wanting to leave the clinic in spite of getting a better job.


Red Beard is built on a lot of emotion. Somewhere in the beginning of the movie, Dr. Niide tells Yasumoto that “There is always some story of great misfortune behind illness.” As the movie progresses, we witness the sad pasts of a few patients, which change the way we look at patients. The movie also leaves us with an awed respect for the medical profession, for doctors are very nobly portrayed.


The movie is based on a novel “Akahige Shinryotan” by Shugoro Yamamoto. The screenplay and direction by Akira Kurosawa are absolutely fantastic. The characterization has been handled very well. There are a lot of characters in this movie, and none of these characters are unimportant or unnecessary in the movie. Each character, however small, has at least one scene where s/he shines. The background score by Masaru Satô is pleasant and gels very well with the happenings in the movie. The cinematography is exquisite. Despite being a black-and-white one, the entire look-and-feel of the movie is rich, making one visualize the colors.

Red Beard boasts of some fabulous acting and very true-to-life body language by the entire cast. Toshirô Mifune, who plays Dr. Niide, is simply phenomenal. He puts in a very subtle performance as Dr. Niide. I’ve loved his performances in other Kurosawa movies, but this performance makes me respect him even more as an actor. Yuzo Kayama plays the role of Dr. Yasumoto with much maturity. The gradual change of Dr. Yasumoto has been performed very well by him. Even the other actors, who have very minor roles to play, have turned in fabulous performances.


This movie has a high repeat value. After seeing the movie for the first time, my head was full of images and scenes from the movie. Later, when settling down to sleep that night, those images and scenes kept returning to me, and I decided to see it again. I did, and I wasn’t bored at all. In fact, I relished the movie even more, this time concentrating more on the acting and the technical aspects of the film.

Red Beard is 3 hours long. It is quite slowly paced, but it is because of this slow pace that the movie leaves a lasting impression. If the movie were any shorter, there’d be a small gnawing feeling at the end that something was amiss and that the movie seemed rushed.


Red Beard was a turning point in Akira Kurosawa’s career for two reasons: One, it was his last black-and-white movie. Two, it was the last movie in which Toshirô Mifune and Akira Kurosawa, considered to be one of the world’s leading actor-director duo, worked together. They had done 16 movies together, and had changed the way the world looked at Japanese cinema.


I highly recommend this movie. Red Beard requires a lot of patience to watch, and the patience is well-rewarded at the end, for it gives us hope and a newfound thirst for life, though based in the most unlikely of places where one can find inspiration: a clinic abundant with death, sorrow, and mental and physical illness.