Doctor Takashi Shimura (lead of Ikiru just four years later) is a drunken gruff pain in the ass, treating ingrate criminals and helpless local youths who won’t stop drinking the swamp water. He tries convincing young gangster Toshiro Mifune (in his first AK film) that his TB diagnosis is serious and to keep himself healthy. As an American viewer it takes a while to realize that both the doc and gangster are blunt and rough in an un-Japanese way.

AK didn’t have his regulars yet, so he borrows a Mizoguchi actor as the doc’s sober schoolmate who runs a respectable practice, and a Naruse actress as the doc’s assistant, hiding out from the gangster she used to be involved with. When that gangster returns to town, he gets his own theme song. Extremely anti-yakuza overall – wonder if the studio got threats. With the stagey acting from the doctor and rough condition of the film print, it feels a decade older than it is, but probably belongs in the pantheon, unlike the last classic Criterion disc I watched.