Akira Kurosawa’s final collaboration with Toshiro Mifune features the topknots and kimonos of Seven Samurai and Yojimbo and embodies an ethic of stoic service. But this time Mifune plays a doctor running a ramshackle clinic in a poor neighborhood of Tokyo who has to teach a social-climbing young physician (Yūzō Kayama) how to care about people while caring for them. Notes of Ikiru. -Lee Gardner
1965 Akira Kurosawa 2.35:1 B&W DCP 185 min. In Japanese with subtitles.