Yojimbo's Movie Reviews (2060)

Rate Movie:

This movie was an epic failure This movie was horrible This movie was not good This movie was average This movie was okay This movie was good This movie was great This movie was incredible

Add Movie To List:

Red Beard ( Akahige ) 
"Red Beard" by Yojimbo
3/4 stars

An ambitious and arrogant young intern finds himself in a rural clinic for the poor against his wishes, but soon finds there is more to life than wealth and status under the tutelage of a severe but kind-hearted doctor. Red Beard is almost Dickensian. in it's melding of period drama and social commentary, all told with a decidedly left wing slant. The Siu clinic is a fledgling "welfare state", where treatment is free to the needy, and Kurosawa takes great pains to illustrate that a man's worth is not the sum of his material possessions. The film is structured into a series of short stories centering around different patients, each with a tragic event in their past. The finest example is the final story of Ting, a young girl suffering abuse at the hands of a brothel's madam who slowly learns that there are good people in the world, after being rescued in a great scene in which Red Beard ably hands out the injuries he later heals! It's VERY long and rather short on action compared to his samurai films, but it's also a genuinely touching, heartwarming and good natured tale that is Kurosawa at his most human.

Recent Comments

Comment On Review