Red Beard

The best of Kurosawa’s films are a challenge to look into our greatest fears and at our most terrible afflictions, whether personal or systemic, without turning away. Arguably the best Kurosawa film, Red Beard does not turn away.

Remember when ”ER” delivered keen social critiques wrapped in satisfying drama? If you miss that medicine, you need a dose of director Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, a three-hour soap opera about a 19th-century Japanese clinic.

It's hokum lifted to the highest denominator, the banal made into near art by great skill and craftsmanship by the Japanese master.

As the older doctor, Toshiro Mifune is superb; and though the film has been criticized for its excessive sentimentality by some, it’s a masterful evocation of period and a probing study of the conflict between responsibility and idealism.

As an elegy to a perfect fusion of directorial mastery and an actor’s indomitable screen presence, it’s hard to imagine something more memorable and affecting than Red Beard.

Mifune is as great here as he ever has been.

Red Beard is well meant and well made, no question about it. But it unfolds familiarly and, at 185 minutes, practically forever.