Red Beard's Birthday
On April 3, 1965, Akira Kurosawa’s film “Akahige 赤ひげ (Red Beard)” was released on Japanese cinema screens.
The literary basis of the script for the film was the Shūgorō Yamamoto's short story collection "Clinic of the Red Beard." The plot of the film is also interwoven with the storyline of the novel of Fyodor Dostoevsky "Humiliated and Insulted".
The next country after Japan, where the film "Red Beard" was shown, was Italy, where Akira Kurosawa's picture took part in the Venice International Film Festival and was nominated for the main award of this festival - the Golden Lion.
In the struggle for the Golden Lion, Kurosawa’s film lost to Luchino Visconti’s film “Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa... (Sandra)” and, as a loser, it made the company for a number of outstanding film productions, including Marlen Khutsiev’s film “Мне двадцать лет (I Am Twenty)”. But the jury of the film festival, chaired by the Italian poet Carlo Bo, did not leave the films of Khutsiev and Kurosawa without awards. The film "I Am Twenty" was awarded a special jury prize, and the film "Red Beard" received an award for Best Actor (Toshiro Mifune).
At the beginning of the next, 1966, year Kurosawa's film was nominated for the American Golden Globe Award as the best foreign language film, but lost the prize to Federico Fellini's film "Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits)".
The percentage of positive reviews of American film critics, according to the site Rotten Tomatoes, is relatively low - only 73%. For example, in the archives of The New York Times, I did not find any mention of this film at all, although it participated in the New York Film Festival in September 1965. However, the most respected American film critic Roger Ebert devoted two reviews to this film, one in 1969, the other in 2010. Ebert rated this Kurosawa movie to the maximum - 4 stars - and included it on his list of Great Movies.
In his 1969 review, Ebert wrote:
"Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard is assembled with the complexity and depth of a good 19th-century novel, and it is a pleasure, in a time of stylishly fragmented films, to watch a director taking the time to fully develop his characters."
And in a 2010 review, Ebert writes:
""Red Beard" is a long and deliberate film, as it must be, because the lessons of the great doctor cannot be ticked off in vignettes. Doctors need to watch awhile at deathbeds, and learn know the patients. We need to observe how a man who thinks of himself as flawed can be wholly good. And how a man who has an unearned high opinion of himself can learn goodness through humility. I believe this film should be seen by every medical student."
And here's what is surprising and indicative: Kurosawa’s films “reached” (if they reached) the screens of Soviet cinemas, as a rule, many years after the premiere. But "Red Beard", according to Sergey Kudryavtsev, Soviet moviegoers were able to see literally after one and a half years (just something!) after the premiere in Japan. That is, even Soviet censorship praised this creation of the great Master extremely highly.
And the following figure speaks of the audience’s rating of the film: more than 76% of IMDB Kinopoisk users around the world rated the film from 8 to 10. Based on this and the above success indicators, the rating of the film according to FilmGourmand was 8.507, which allowed it to take 320th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
