Epic Vision

Even the modest projects of Japan's Akira Kurosawa are conceived and executed on a grand scale. Whether his subject is history (Seven Samurai), social commentary (The Bad Sleep Well), classic drama (The Lower Depths) or thriller (High and Low), Kurosawa invests each film with the breadth of an epic vision. Taken together, his films are like a single, vivid morality play, often heroic and sometimes cynical, celebrating the triumph of man over circumstance.

The audience for Kurosawa films in the U.S. has been severely limited by the vagaries of film distribution. Although Rashomon became an art-house staple after it won an Academy Award in 1951, most of Kurosawa's other films have not found their way to many American screens. Red Beard, like Pierrot Le Fou first shown in 1965 but just released in New York, is being presented at a special foreign-language theater with only a whisper of publicity. Thus, filmgoers across the country may once again miss a masterpiece by one of the world's great film makers.

Why, and What. Red Beard is an oriental Pilgrim's Progress. In 19th century Japan, an ambitious young doctor (Yuzo Kayama) pays a formal call on the director of a public-health clinic. There he is shocked to find that he has been given a post as a mere intern.

Stung by the indignity of the assignment, he rebels against the hospital rules, refuses to wear a uniform and grows careless of his patients' needs. Only the silent, looming presence of the head of the clinic, who has been nicknamed Red Beard, prevents the irate young man from quitting altogether. "This place is terrible," a fellow intern tells the young man. "The patients are all slum people; they're full of fleas -- they even smell bad. Being here makes you wonder why you ever wanted to be come a doctor." It is through Red Beard (Toshiro Mifune) that the young doctor learns not only why but what, in a full metaphorical sense, being a doctor of medicine really means.

An array of human wreckage straggles through the clinic in motley procession: a homicidal schizophrenic who was repeatedly raped and beaten at the age of nine; a wheelwright working even as he dies in penance for an imagined evil; a young girl, orphaned and being kept captive by syphilitic whores. Their tragedies begin gradually to touch the young doctor until, at film's end, he finally tells Red Beard that he wants to remain at the clinic. "You'll regret it," grumbles Red Beard, turning to hide his pleasure.

Lapidary Care. As for plot, Red Beard could be Dr. Gillespie, and the intern Dr. Kildare: the story is that simple. But where his hero is a physician, Kurosawa is a metaphysician. Going beneath the bathos, he explores his characters' psychology until their frailties and strengths become a sum of humanity itself. Despite his pretensions, the young doctor is as flawed--and believable--as his patients. If Red Beard himself is a heroic figure, he is nonetheless cast in a decidedly human mold: gruff and sometimes violent--as when he forcibly takes the girl from her captors--he keeps the clinic open by such inglorious expedients as coercion and extortion. Kurosawa seems to share with Red Beard the knowledge that the price of compassion is often compromise.

Stylistically, Kurosawa is without peer. Of Red Beard he said: "I wanted to make something so magnificent that people would just have to see it." Kurosawa's artistry is in the lapidary care that he gives to every aspect of his films. He holds scenes, without cutting, for minutes on end, forcing the eye to choose its own emphasis. His use of telephoto lenses to foreshorten perspective is so expert that it is often unnoticeable.

Since Red Beard, Kurosawa has occupied himself by preparing his first American film, a dramatization of the events leading up to Pearl Harbor called Tora! Tora! Tora! Twentieth Century-Fox gave him absolute freedom, and Kurosawa revised the script 27 separate times before he felt that he was ready to proceed. Then late last month after only nine days of shooting, the director, 58, was overcome with exhaustion and forced to withdraw from the film. Said Kurosawa's wife, "My husband is no longer young." Unable to replace the irreplaceable, Fox has announced that it will halt production to give Kurosawa time to recover. Even without Tora! Tora! Tora!, Kurosawa has already produced a body of work--Red Beard is an integral part--that has assured his reputation as one of the monumental moviemakers of all time. He himself has said, "It is quite enough if a human being has but one thing where he is strong." Kurosawa's artistic strength is his ability to transform the stuff of life into elements of epic.

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