"Red Beard" (1965)

A film that one has to watch alone, at one's leisure in the afternoon, with a cup of white tea and the day's obstreperous vulgarities cast out by windowblinds. Can a film read like a book? It can, and this film is one of those, exemplary for its dynamic shifts and variety of tones: its struggle with the woes & simple purposes of life are novelistic. Red Beard is something more mature than Ikiru, but made with the vitality of Seven Samurai, a 3-hour film that engrosses thoroughly, without the slightest misstep or interruption. A film that continually surprises you with its subtle shifts of humor and pathos, and its remarkable, effortless story-within-a-story metaframing. In short, the work of a master who has perfected all that hollywood vies to offer - namely the sap and sentimentality of human dramas - while retaining his own personal stamp, his aged sanity, his will toward complete honesty with the cruelties and misfortunes that constitute our tiny perilous life.
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Toshiro Mifune's last film with Kurosawa. Maybe Kurosawa sensed the rift during production (which lasted nearly 2 years), and had Mifune play the sensei, alluding to Kurosawa himself, as a benevolent but hardedged director of a clinic, nicknamed Redbeard, while casting a young handsome co-lead as Redbeard's understudy/apprentice, who takes up the kind of role a younger Mifune would have had opposite Takashi Shimura. Except by the end of this film's story, the rift that separated the tough but charitable Redbeard from his once intractable apprentice had already been bridged and crossed: in life, Mifune and Kurosawa had already outgrown each other, and would go their separate ways.
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Separation of body and spirit: death. The death-agony is not one of peace but of the unendurable tension of the body giving penultimate birth to the spirit. The pain of the spirit tearing the flesh off one last time, to be born again. A doctor, like a priest, is here seen as a confessor, a humane observer who bestows dignity in death and sickness to the dying and the sickly. Physical suffering is interpreted as spiritual ailment, often a sickness unto death, which the doctor can only help alleviate with his bond of humanity, of compassion, to his fellow human beings.

Kurosawa's irreligious cynicism is brooked by his abundant humanist faith in the commonalities of the heart. There is no cure for death or for sickness, but there is always a last chance for redemption, for setting aright one's torment by the past, and palliating the inescapable pain of existence.