Yojimbo's Movie Reviews (2056)

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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.

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