Red Beard (1965)

19 December 2017

I wanted to watch Red Beard mainly because it was the last film Kurosawa did with Mifune before the end of Kurosawa's most successful era in film. I thought it was a solid film but one that doesn't age as well as many of the other films. The story follows a young doctor with his apprenticeship with the older doctor (called Red Beard) in a struggling Japanese village.

The story moves very slowly and relies on that pacing a little too strongly (and not always working successfully). Additionally, it feels at times like more of a cinematography experiment, which in part accounts for its 3h5m runtime. The acting is decent but only Mifune's seems to age well - the other actors are sometimes overly melodramatic. A good film, but between its length and age it'll be forgettable to most. 7/10