A Film Canon

This extraordinary demystification of the yakuza ethic turns on the idiosyncratic father-son relationship between Samada (Takashi Shimura), a brittle, alcoholic doctor, and Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune), a gangster dying of tuberculosis - and, more specifically, between Samada's profoundly anti-rhetorical presence, encapsulated in his perpetual 'humph', which cuts through all pretension (including his own), and Matsunaga's hyperactive posturing; that is, between Shimura's naturalism and Mifune's hyperbole. In the process, gangsterdom is mercilessly pathologised ("a rotten maggot...infested with bacteria"), placed on a continuum with both Matsunaga's decaying lungs, and the fetid swamp from which the disease was presumably caught, while its representatives are either inhumanly cruel, or motivated by the basest concerns, such that even Matsunaga's final gesture of self- sacrifice is, at some level, unforgivable, insofar as it takes place within a framework of yakuza honour. The result is an unusual identification of vigilantism with sterilisation (or, alternatively, with organised justice, rather than the individualistic imperative of the yakuza), as well as a relocation of courage from traditional displays of masculinity ("the worst kind of cowardice") to Samada's vernacular pragmatism ("feudalistic loyalty crap"), producing one of the most demotic, conspicuously undignified, Japanese films to date, and invoking a crisis in masculinity that is beautifully imaged in Matsunaga's dream of chasing himself along a beach, gesturing towards the noir overtones of Kurosawa's next two films.