Akira Kurosawa’s Yoidore tenshi (US: Drunken Angel) marked the first of 16 collaborations between the director and Japanese screen legend Toshirô Mifune who here plays a young, bitter yakuza named Matsunaga, newly befriended by the shady doctor (Takashi Shimura) who diagnoses his tuberculosis after removing a bullet from his arm. When Matsunaga’s old boss Onada (Reisaburo Yamamoto) is released from prison, he expects to take over the gang again, but Matsunaga isn’t too eager to relinquish control, so a deadly power struggle ensues. It’s a somber film with a dark palette, a melancholy guitar score (including a “Killer’s Anthem”), and a postwar Japan of deadened landscapes and typhus-infested waters. In one of his earliest roles, Mifune’s physicality is already on display here in, for example, a gorgeous nightmare sequence in which Matsunaga chops open his own coffin on a beach and an extended final knife fight between the two gangsters through puddles of paint.