Drunken Angel, a.k.a. Yoidore tenshi (Toho Studios, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home from work relatively early last night (Saturday, May 2) and we jointly watched a quite impressive film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” TV series: Drunken Angel (originally Yoidore tenshi), a 1948 Japanese movie directed and co-written (with Keinosuke Uekusa) by the young Akira Kurosawa and co-starring two of Kurosawa’s all-time favorite actors, Takashi Shimura (in their fifth film together) and Toshiro Mifune (in his first of 16 Kurosawa films). It was shot during the U.S. occupation of Japan after World War II, and deals with the collective case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) the entire nation of Japan seems to have experienced after having lost the war. Specifically it’s about an alcoholic doctor, Sanada (Shimura), and Matsunaga (Mifune), a yakuza gangster who comes to Sanada to have a bullet removed from his hand. It also turns out he needs to be treated for a disease which turns out to be tuberculosis. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller explained during his intro that the yakuza were a phenomenon in Japan that started right after World War II. The Japanese government during the war had built up the culture of the samurai and used it to motivate their young men to perform similar feats of bravery during the war, including training to be kamikaze pilots and give their lives in suicide missions against American ships. After the war a lot of young men who’d survived took up crime and organized gangs that operated according to the principles of bushido, the honor code of the samurai – or at least what they thought bushido was. If this is historically accurate, it wouldn’t have been the first time in history a criminal gang started as the result of a war. The Mafia originally began as a resistance movement to Napoleon’s occupation of Italy in the 1810’s – the word “Mafia” is an Italian acronym for “Anti-French Society” – which turned to crime after Napoleon’s defeat. And Jesse James and his brother Frank started out as Confederate guerrillas under the command of William Quantrill in 1862 and turned to crime once the Confederates lost the Civil War.

The main conflict of this quite remarkable movie is between Sanada and Matsunaga, and between Sanada’s efforts to get him to give up alcohol, sex, and the other accoutrements of his gangster life and take his disease seriously, and Matsunaga’s own conflicts between following Sanada’s advice and avoiding the loss of “face” he fears will befall him if his former associates see him drawing back from drinking and screwing. Also, Sanada has a live-in nurse named Miyo (Chieko Nakakita) – it’s not clear whether they’re romantically involved, but probably not – whose abusive former boyfriend Okada (Reizaburô Yamamoto), is just about to be released from a two-year prison sentence. In a bit of coincidence-mongering Kurosawa and Uekusa should have been ashamed of (it’s the one flaw in an otherwise impeccably constructed film), Okada is also Matsunaga’s former boss in the yakuza, and when he gets out he’s determined both to regain control of his old gang and to force Miyo to come back to him. On several occasions Miyo seriously weighs whether to go back to Okada despite his history of abusing her, and Sanada keeps trying to talk her out of it. On a night out with the gang, Matsunaga at first refuses the offer of a drink because he’s at least briefly trying to stay on Sanada’s program and recover from the TB, but Okada goads him into drinking and Matsunaga ultimately ends up drunk and much the worse for wear. Much of the action centers around a wild nightclub and dance hall called “Number One Cabaret” (the signs are in Roman letters) where the yakuza are “regulars” and one of the entertainers is a singer (Shikuzo Kazagi) who in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s had a brief run of success on the Japanese charts with songs that all had the word “boogie” in the title even though, judging from the example here (“Jungle Boogie,” with music by Ryôichi Hattori and lyrics by Kurosawa himself), they had more to do with rhythm-and-blues than what we Americans think of as boogie-woogie. (One of the quirkier results of the American occupation of Japan was that a lot of young Japanese got exposed to American popular music; there’d been something of a jazz scene in Japan before World War II but the Japanese government banned it during the war as an expression of enemy culture. After the war Japanese musicians took up American pop but put an Asian “spin” on it.)

There are also some fascinating supporting characters, including Dr. Takahama (Eitarô Shindô), a classmate of Sanada’s from medical school who avoided alcoholism and went on to a lucrative, successful career while Sanada got mired in the dregs, only when Matsunaga showed up at Dr. Takahama’s clinic, Takahama X-rayed him, diagnosed him with TB, and sent him to Sanada for treatment because Sanada knew more about that particular disease than he did. And there’s a dirty sump of water that becomes a character in itself; it was apparently a set built for another Toho Studios movie but Kurosawa appropriated it and turned it into a metaphor for the waste and destruction left behind when Japan lost the war. Early on in the movie Dr. Sanada sees a group of young boys about to bathe in the water, and he scares them out of it by telling them they’ll get typhus. And there’s a fascinating fight to the finish at the end between Matsunaga and Okada in which Matsunaga tries to kill Okada but is too weak to do so. They have this fight while covered in spilled white paint, and I wondered if Kurosawa covered them in white as a symbol of their lost innocence. After Matsunaga’s death Sanada encounters a 17-year-old schoolgirl (Yoshiko Kuga) who had earlier been counterpointed to Matsunaga as an example of a responsible TB patient who followed her doctor’s orders and took her treatments seriously. He also runs into Gin (Noriko Sengoku), Matsunaga’s former girlfriend, who took charge of his body and had him cremated. She recalls that she tried to get Matsunaga to move with her out of Tokyo and to her family’s farm in the countryside, where he could have got away from the yakuza and their pressures and recovered in relative peace.

Drunken Angel is a quite remarkable movie, and though I’ve considered myself a movie maven I must say I’m far back of scratch on Kurosawa. When Eddie Muller mentioned that Kurosawa’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Seven Samurai (1954), was the first non-English-language film he ever saw at age 12, I felt ashamed that I’ve never seen it at all. I’ve quite liked the Kurosawa films I have seen, including such modern-dress movies as Scandal (1950) and the awesome High and Low (1963), but I haven’t pursued him the way I have with other directors, and it’s possible one reason is I don’t much like the sound of the Japanese language. It’s harsh, guttural, and considerably less pleasant to the ears (these Western monolingual-English ears, anyway) than Chinese. Also, one oddity is that Kurosawa got stereotyped from the international success of The Seven Samurai as “the samurai director,” when at least half of his films take place in the Japan of his own time. But Drunken Angel – Kurosawa’s eighth film as director and the first one that he felt expressed his personal vision instead of being merely an assignment for hire from Toho – emerges as a masterpiece and a worthy entry into the film noir canon.