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 Also Known as: Akahige
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Runtime: 185 Minutes
Year: 1965
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Colour: Black & White
Speciality: Kurosawa, world renowned for his samurai films, excels at handling a very humane film. Along with Kurosawas other film in the same genre, ‘Ikiru’, ‘Red Beard’ becomes a humanitarian masterpiece, at the same time highly entertaining. This was the last film the Kurosawa did with the legendary Toshiro Mifune.
Palador DVD Code: PFE0025b1
Available As: Part of Kurosawa Box Set
This humanitarian masterpiece has an arrogant, just-graduated doctor, Noboru, forced to work in a spartan, rural clinic run by a doctor known as 'Red Beard'. Noboru dislikes both - the job, and Red Beard who is sentimental and fair, but also strict and a hard taskmaster. Stubborn and unwilling to comply initially, he soon discovers what it is to be a doctor. After healing a little girl he begins to see his patients as real, suffering people whose pains can be eased with his care. | | RED BEARD - CREDITS | | | | | | | Directed by
Written by
Produced by
Cinematography by
Film Editing by
Production Design by | Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa
Masato Ide
Hideo Oguni
Ryuzo Kikushima
Tomoyuki Tanaka
Asakazu Nakai
Akira Kurosawa
Yoshirô Muraki | | | | | | | | | | | | | Cast: | | | | | | | | Character' name
Dr. Kyojio Niide
Dr. Noboru Yasumoto
Sahachi
Osugi
Onaka
Madwoman
Genzo Tsugawa
Otoyo
Okuni, the mistress
Dr. Handayu Mori
Goheiji
Mr. Yasumoto
Tokubei Izumiya
Kin, the madam | Actor's name
Toshirô Mifune
Yuzo Kayama
Tsutomu Yamazaki
Reiko Dan
Miyuki Kuwano
Kyôko Kagawa
Tatsuyoshi Ehara
Terumi Niki
Akemi Negishi
Yoshio Tsuchiya
Eijirô Tono
Chishu Ryu
Takashi Shimura
Haruko Sugimura | |
| | RED BEARD - INFLUENCES & REFERENCES | | | | | | | | Red Beard was adapted from the novel Akahige shinryotan by Shugoro Yamamoto.
Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Insulted and the Injured provides a major subplot about a young girl, Otoyo (Terumi Niki), who is rescued from a brothel.
Red Beard looks at the problem of social injustice and explores two of Kurosawa's favourite topics: existential humanism and existentialism. |
| | AWARDS & NOMINATIONS | | | | | | | | It Won the FIPRESCI Prize and the Jury Prize for Krzysztof Kieslowski and was nominated for the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.
It won the Bodil Best European Film award for Krzysztof Kieslowski (director)
The film won the Golden Lion for Krzysztof Kieslowski at the 1988 Polish Film Festival.
It won Critics Award for Best Foreign Film at French Syndicate of Cinema Critics
Won the European Best Film Award at European Film Awards |
| | RED BEARD - QUOTES | | | | | | | | About the Film
"A mature work that merits the term most apply to it: Dostoyevskian." - Chicago Reader
"A moving illustration that hope and generosity, even in small amounts, will always persevere and make a difference." - Q Network Film Desk
"Remarkable imagery and an engrossing, Dostoyevskian screenplay." - Apollo Guide
"Many directors still have never created one film equal to Red Beard." - ToxicUniverse.com
"Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard is assembled with the complexity and depth of a good l9th-century novel, and it is a pleasure, in a time of stylishly fragmented films, to watch a director taking the time to fully develop his characters." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times |
| | RED BEARD - TRIVIA | | | | | | | | Red Beard is 185 minutes long and was shot at an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. It was Kurosawa's first film to make use of a magnetic 4-track stereo soundtrack.
This is the last film by Kurosawa in which Toshiro Mifune appeared.
This film also marked the end of black-and-white filming by Kurosawa.
Principal photography took two years.
Period construction of the hospital went as far as to use the right kind of aged wood that would have been used in the region at the time the film is set, per Kurosawa's request.
According to the DVD commentary by film scholar Stephen Prince, this is the only Akira Kurosawa film to feature nudity |
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