In more ways than one this three-hour drama from Akira Kurosawa marks an end to many staples in the director’s cinema, towards a more pessimistic, rigid cinema, away from the heroes of the past, away from the student-master dichotomy that so typified the previous two decades, away from Toshiro Mifune as Kurosawa’s screen surrogate, and away, unfortunately, from wide-screen black and white photography, to which he’d mastered in total beginning with “The Hidden Fortress” in ‘58. Blending two of his regular inspirations, Shugoro Yamamoto and Dostoevsky, Kurosawa focuses on medicine and illness, like “The Quiet Duel”, “Drunken Angel”, and “Ikiru” before, with Mifune as the head of a government funded clinic for the poor, whose new intern, the brash Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama) feels like he’s trapped in a prison of poverty and death, until Red Beard (Mifune’s nickname) learns him the ropes of caring, healing, and existentialist humanism. Kurosawa breaks the film up into lengthy vignettes – the painful death of an old man and the story of his abandoned daughter, a saintly carpenter tells of his beloved wife and the tragedy of the 1923 earthquake, the rescue and recovery of a sheltered young girl sold into slavery, and her friendship with a poor young thief – stories that make up the emotional backbone of the film, while the growth of Yasumoto from young rebel to respectable and humble doctor acts as the conventional frame. For those who have never seen this very long, difficult, but important film in the evolution of Kurosawa’s style, my suggestion is to watch the film one day, formulate some thoughts and sit on them, and then watch it again the following day with the commentary track by Stephen Prince; nobody this side of Donald Richie knows Kurosawa and his style better than Prince, who points out the key plot references to Dostoevsky’s “The Insulted and the Injured”, and suggests the ways in which Kurosawa passes from controlled cinematic experimentation to a more formal Japanese style he’d use for the rest of his career, especially with the last minute addition of Chishu Ryu in the final sequence, instantly recognizable as Ozu’s favorite actor. Nobody would ever confuse Kurosawa for Ozu, and even the appearance by Ryu is nothing more than a nod from one master to another, five years after his death, but the scene he’s in, a very formal wedding arrangement, is one of Kurosawa’s simplest visual moments of the period, a transition to an introspective style to come, and a style which, regrettably, will never be as successful as the dynamic visual splendor of his 50’s and 60’s masterpieces.