In the part of a bomb damaged town built around a cesspool, a gangster with TB and an alcoholic doctor collide to form an uneasy friendship. Drunken Angel can be a difficult movie to watch as the characters are all deeply flawed.

The angel of this movie, Dr. Sanada, is an ill-tempered alcoholic, as scruffy as he is cantankerous. Shimura Takashi gives a wonderful and unsympathetic performance as a doctor with little patience and even less tact. Though disheveled and always with a level of alcohol in his system he is a compassionate and skilled doctor. As he informs Matsunaga, the local gangster who comes to him for help, angels don’t look like beautiful dance hall girls, they look like him. Sanada not only tries to save Matsunaga’s life, but also his soul from being completely stamped out by the violent life he leads.

Matsunaga is torn between doing what must be done to live and the immorally squalid life where he is a big fish in a typhoid infested pond. Like Sanada, he has a terrible temper as well. Mifune Toshiro brings out all of the fear and frustration built up in this brutish character.

Unlike many yakuza or gangster movies, the criminals are not glamourized. Doctor Sanada speaks for those who live under the yakuza’s rule when he tells Matsunaga, the yakuza code of honor is a façade and merely self-serving. He compares it to the feudal system and declares it obsolete.


Sad guitar music often plays in the background setting the mood. Further setting the mood is the pool of filth where children play, foretelling their future in the crime ridden part of town.

The two damaged alpha males are fascinating to watch as they butt heads. A powder keg of fear and violence is set off when the deadly and treacherous Okada is let out of prison and has his sights set on Matsunaga’s job and girlfriend and Sanada’s female assistant.

This is a powerful movie about two opposing forces at work for the souls of the people, the hedonistic and violent yakuza on one side and the life ruled by reason and compassion on the doctor’s side of the disease infested swamp. It would take a “dirty, drunken angel” to reside in such a place and an angel tough enough to fight for the hard-won wins and suffer the heartbreaking losses. Drunken Angel is an emotional ride, but one worth seeking out and trying.