Toshiro Mifune is one of the most famous Japanese actors of all time, and one who endeared himself to western viewers in his iconic roles in films like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. And although Mifune is best known for his samurai characters, three incredible performances from the beginning of his career suggest an actor of greater range than he sometimes gets credit for.
In Drunken Angel, his inaugural collaboration with Akira Kurosawa, Mifune plays Matsunaga, a stinking-drunk yakuza lowlife who is diagnosed with tuberculosis by a slum doctor (Takashi Shimura, Kurosawa's other great actor, and often underrated due to the long shadow cast by Mifune). Despite his brutishness, Matsunaga is a far cry from the vulgar swordsmen Mifune would become famous for, exuding an understated gangster cool. The only person that seems able to penetrate his facade is the good doctor, who routinely sends him into a rage; the first several times they meet, Matsunaga inevitably roughs up the jaded physician, and the core of the film's story is one of reluctant friendship between the not-yet-entirely-hopeless yakuza and the cynical but good-hearted doctor trying to save him.
Mifune here gives one of the most convincing performances of drunkenness ever seen on film; Matsunaga is so believably blacked out throughout the majority of Drunken Angel that you cannot help but wonder if Kurosawa (who became notorious for his insistence on realism down to the most minute details) was handing Mifune cups of sake in between takes. But the movie's greatest moment comes when the stony gangster suddenly explodes to life in a frenzied dance hall sequence, and the positively demonic expressions on Mifune's face during this scene suggest the desperate circumstances of the film's setting, as well as the ferocity that Mifune would later become synonymous with.
"Call the precinct. Tell them to bring extra pocket squares for my forehead."
Kurosawa's stylish noir Stray Dog sees Mifune playing Murakami, a rookie detective struggling to atone for the grievous error of losing his sidearm (a plot conceit notably borrowed by P.T. Anderson in Magnolia), now being used by a thief in a series of killings. While his role in Drunken Angel had key similarities with his later samurai parts, Murakami is something else altogether: here we see Mifune as a very straitlaced character, shameful but doggedly determined to make up for his mistake.
It's a treat to watch this in conjunction with Drunken Angel, as the combative relationship between Shimura and Mifune is transformed here into one between kōhai and senpai, as the elder Shimura tutors the junior detective not just in the art of crime-stopping, but in the discipline of living with a job that brings him into contact with humanity's darkest impulses. Mifune's performance is a delicate and precisely understated one: Murakami is humiliated and ashamed, but also exudes strength, determination, and a quiet dignity.
When Murakami is forced to descend into the depths of a battered, postwar Tokyo in order to redeem himself, he finds himself confronted with a telling twist of fate: he and the gun thief are both former soldiers who were robbed on the train back home. But Murakami rejects the social context of crime which Kurosawa so carefully demonstrates in an 8+ minute tour of Tokyo's slums (filmed secretly in actual black markets and flophouses!), insisting that the killer chose his path in life, just as Murakami chose his. It's the old (then new) argument between structuralism and existentialism, but played out in a hothouse Tokyo noir.
Although Magnolia borrowed Stray Dog's narrative frame, the most direct descendant of the film may actually be David Fincher's Seven, which also depicts a seasoned detective and a young, untested one teaming up to catch a brutal killer. There is also an echo of Murakami's denial of crime's social context in Seven: when Somerset gives an account of the myriad horrors in the perpetually rain-soaked city (Fincher's version of Kurosawa's blistering heatwave), Mills dismisses the offenders as "fucking crazies"—to which Somerset responds, "you can't afford to be this naive."
"Rolex watches and colorful swatches / I'm digging in pockets, motherfuckers can't stop it."
Following another collaboration in the low-key tabloid drama Scandal, the stormy existential questions at the heart of of Stray Dog would come to the fore in Kurosawa and Mifune's breakout film: Rashomon. The engine driving the film is Mifune's immortal performance as Tajōmaru, the barbarous bandit at the center of the film's cubist murder mystery.
This is classic Mifune in full bloom, playing a character so bestial and untamed it's hard to believe this is the same actor that played the tormented detective in Stray Dog or the frosty, besotted yakuza in Drunken Angel. Tajōmaru, a notorious bandit, comes across more like a force of nature: a leering, feral Pan, constantly scratching at bugs and bursting into piercing shrieks of laughter. A creature of pure id unencumbered by socialization or morality, Tajōmaru is a cruel, sensual beast, and one of the most unforgettable characters in Kurosawa and Mifune's oeuvre.
The three films form something of a trilogy, however unlikely, as all three also conclude with memorable fight sequences involving Mifune that subvert the glamorous, stylized violence that is the hallmark of most cinema. In Drunken Angel, Mifune's gangster, now ravaged by tuberculosis, confronts the abusive Okada, and the resulting fight is a concerto of awkward, messy human violence, with both combatants becoming soaked with spilled white paint. At the conclusion of Stray Dog, Mifune's detective chases his frantic quarry through the underbrush, in a similarly clumsy struggle that reduces both men to panting animals. And in Rashomon, the dramatic duel seen in Tajōmaru's own account is belied by the version of the story told by Shimura's woodcutter, where the vicious bandit and the stoic samurai tremble with terror and desperation, horrified at the prospect of their own death and at the thought of taking the other's life.
Rashomon is a recognized classic of world cinema; Stray Dog and Drunken Angel are beloved by many Kurosawa fans, but less familiar to most viewers. But all three films form a tapestry of the great director's nascent development of voice, style, and thematic fixation. And although Kurosawa would've no doubt become a cornerstone of film history regardless, it's impossible to imagine his films without the kinetic and furiously lived-in performances of Toshiro Mifune.
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