Synopsis
Aspiring to an easy job as personal physician to a wealthy family, Noboru Yasumoto is disappointed when his first post after medical school takes him to a small country clinic under the gruff doctor Red Beard. Yasumoto rebels in numerous ways, but Red Beard proves a wise and patient teacher. He gradually introduces his student to the unglamorous side of the profession, ultimately assigning him to care for a prostitute rescued from a local brothel.
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Cast
- Toshirō MifuneDr. Kyojio Niide ("Red Beard")
- Yūzō KayamaDr. Noboru Yasumoto
- Tsutomu YamazakiSahachi
- Reiko DanOsugi
- Miyuki KuwanoOnaka
- Kyōko KagawaMadwoman ("The Mantis")
- Tatsuyoshi EharaGenzô Tsugawa
- Terumi NikiOtoyo
- Akemi NegishiOkuni
- Yoshitaka ZushiChobo
Recommendations
- 100
Chicago Sun-Times
I believe this film should be seen by every medical student. Like Kurosawa's masterpiece, "Ikiru" (1952), it fearlessly regards the meanings of life, and death. - 100
Slant Magazine
The best of Kurosawa’s films are a challenge to look into our greatest fears and at our most terrible afflictions, whether personal or systemic, without turning away. Arguably the best Kurosawa film, Red Beard does not turn away. - 91
Entertainment Weekly
Remember when ”ER” delivered keen social critiques wrapped in satisfying drama? If you miss that medicine, you need a dose of director Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, a three-hour soap opera about a 19th-century Japanese clinic. - 90
Chicago Reader
As the older doctor, Toshiro Mifune is superb; and though the film has been criticized for its excessive sentimentality by some, it’s a masterful evocation of period and a probing study of the conflict between responsibility and idealism. - 90
The New Yorker
In Kurosawa’s dynamic yet intimate wide-screen filmmaking, practicality and empathy merge with psychoanalysis and even bits of magic; the young doctor’s near-fatal close encounter with a female serial killer, and a virtuous man’s deathbed confession of a horrifying marital tragedy, are among the sequences building to a genuinely inspirational conclusion. - 90
Variety
It's hokum lifted to the highest denominator, the banal made into near art by great skill and craftsmanship by the Japanese master. - 88
ReelViews
As an elegy to a perfect fusion of directorial mastery and an actor’s indomitable screen presence, it’s hard to imagine something more memorable and affecting than Red Beard. - 80
TV Guide Magazine
Mifune is as great here as he ever has been.
