The Cinematheque

“A masterpiece … Kurosawa somehow manages to imbue every moment of this three-hour-plus movie with the transcendent vitality and intelligence of a great Victorian novel.”

Michael Sragow, The New Yorker

Considered by some to be the concluding chapter of Kurosawa’s greatest period, Red Beard is, in any event, a watershed work for the master: his last picture in black-and-white, and his final collaboration with leading man Mifune Toshiro—thus ending one of film history’s most celebrated actor-director duos. A towering humanist epic set in the early 19th century, the film has Mifune as the titular gruff but caring doctor committed to fighting poverty and illness in the slums of Edo. When intern Yasumoto (Kayama Yuzo), arrogant and puffed up with a European medical degree, is posted to his clinic, Red Beard must teach the young man a lesson or two in humility and compassion. The film is a tour de force of meticulous period design, and a virtual summation of the themes that dominate the director’s oeuvre.

In Japanese with English subtitles

“A masterful evocation of period and a probing study of the conflict between responsibility and idealism. A mature work that merits the term most apply to it: Dostoyevskian.”

Don Druker, Chicago Reader

“Red Beard is assembled with the complexity and depth of a good 19th-century novel, and it is a pleasure, in a time of stylishly fragmented films, to watch a director taking the time to fully develop his characters … A great and moving film.”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times