Wow. So this was the last collaboration between the great Mifune Toshiro (usually just the coolest man ever, but here the best man) and certainly one of the all time top directors Kurosawa Akira. This movie is absolutely fantastic. And it really just comes down to not just being a good person, and really realizing about yourself, and learning you may not be what you think, and you are better off being the best person you can be, and really doing all you can to help people, because that is what must be done. I seriously cried for the last 20 minutes, not only for sadness, but just because how beautiful the message of the movie was, and how much it moved me. WHAT AN AMAZING FILM! I really need to get the rest of both of their films, though I honestly don’t think either were ever better than when with each other.

REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS…

Kayama Yuzo stars as Yasumoto Noboru a cocky young doctor who expects to be the Shogun’s next doctor, and gets transfered to a medical facility for the poor run by Niide Kyojio or Akahige (Red Beard) played by the late and great Mifune Toshiro. Noboru gets shown around by the doctor he is replacing who obviously hates the place and he hates it too. The heat is all given to the patients, and it is much like a real hospital, no tatami mattes, and the patients have to wear white outfits, and the doctors must wear white uniforms too, all for sanitation and so the doctors can easily be told, but Noboru doesn’t care. He is pissed. He can’t leave because he has been assigned their by law, but he wants to make Akahige want to get rid of him, so he drinks and doesn’t do anything, and keeps his kimono and sword on. Being arrogant, selfish and insincere, but slowly Akahige brings him into their little medical world. There is a female patient known as the Mantis (Kagawa Kyoko) who has murdered 3 clerks at her father’s store with her hairpin, and she escapes, and almost seduces and kills Noboru, but Akahige saves him. Then Akihige has him watch a dieing man, which he can’t do, and from his daughter who shows up too late we hear the story of how she had to stay away from her father because her mother had her marry the man that she was having an affair with, and the daughter had 3 children by him, and eventually got fed up and stabbed him. Akahige gets her a place to stay and blackmails the local official to let her off and get some money for the clinic as well. And Noboru begins to respect Akahige. Then another patient who refuses to stop working and helping the other patients starts to die, and wants to go to his home. Akahige sends Noboru with him, and we find out the mans story. He had met a girl who he eventually convinced to marry him, but she disappeared after a big earthquake, and 2 years later he ran into her again with a young child of her own. He was totally crushed and she came to explain that she had been betrothed to the guy before, and it was what her family wanted so she went and married him and had a child by him after the earthquake, because she owed her family and didn’t think she deserved so much happiness and she begs her husband to hold her, which he does, but she stabs

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