Early Akira Kurosawa movie - the year before Rashomon - which was his second with Toshiro Mifune. It's not an action film, it's about syphilis - awesome, I know, right?
It's a medical melodrama which gets off to a terrific start with Mifune operating on soldiers in a makeshift surgery in 1944. There's some great Kurosawa compositions and atmosphere as Mifune cuts a finger and infects himself and you think "oh this is going to be good".
But once it gets back to Japan, the action movies to a sound stage and the film becomes less interesting. Mifune has dumped his fiancee but still desires her; he works for his dad; one of his nurses is a former crazy bitch who is still a bit crazy.
I kept waiting for the story to start - for him to have sex with the former crazy nurse and to infect her (she seems to want to), or to go mad and start doing weird things, or to sleep with his ex, or to seek revenge on the guy who infected him, or to try to set up a hospital or something and have to keep his condition a secret.
But it never does. Mifune is noble and tormented and Japanese, as is his fiancee. People are concerned about what's going on but there's no forward progression.
Noriko Sengoku (the recovering suicide person) has the second best role. Toshiro Mifune fans will be interested to see how he handles a non gangster/samurai part, almost as if Dr Kildare got syphillis (he does well). Takashia Shimura is dull as Mifune's dad, though he has the requisite gravitas. Miki Sanjo is dull as the dull fiancee.
This isn't much of a movie, mostly because of the story. I guess it was interesting to see Kurosawa and Mifune in a contemporary medical tale.
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