Drunken Angel

Drunken Angel (1948) — watch online on iFILM — is Akira Kurosawa's post-war drama set in a bombed-out Tokyo neighborhood built around a stagnant, garbage-choked swamp. It was the first film Kurosawa made with Toshiro Mifune, and you can feel the collision of two forces that would define Japanese cinema for the next two decades.

Mifune plays a young yakuza who shows up at a back-alley clinic with a bullet wound in his hand. The doctor, Sanada — played by Takashi Shimura as a blunt, hard-drinking man who still cares more than he lets on — diagnoses tuberculosis and refuses to let it go. The gangster refuses to be saved. What follows is less a crime story than an argument between two men who are both wasting themselves, one in alcohol and one in violence.

Kurosawa shot it fast, with jazz on the soundtrack and visible devastation in every frame — the swamp literally sits at the center of the neighborhood as a metaphor that's too obvious to ignore and too vivid to dismiss. Stream Drunken Angel (1948) online on iFILM.