Plot
It stars Takashi Shimura as an alcoholic doctor in postwar Japan who treats a young, small-time hood named Matsunaga (ToshirÅ Mifune), after a gunfight with a rival syndicate. The doctor diagnoses the young gangster with tuberculosis, and convinces him to begin treatment (and quit boozing and womanizing). The two enjoy an uneasy friendship until the gangster's former boss, Okada, who is also the former abusive boyfriend of the doctor's female assistant, is released from prison and seeks to take his gang over once again. The sick young man then stops following the doctor's advice, slips back into old habits and threatens to kill him. Matsunaga realizes that Okada is not a true friend, and that the big Yakuza crime boss is merely using Matsunaga as a pawn to be given up to the rival gang. When the doctor leaves his house to go report on Okada to the police, despite the doctor's orders to remain in bed, Matsunaga slips out to confront Okada (who has also managed to steal Matsunaga's girlfriend Nanae) but Matsunaga is killed in the ensuing knife fight. The film ends with a local shop-owner woman who had feelings for Matsunaga planning to take Matsunaga's ashes to be buried on her farm, far from the corrupt and dirty city, and the doctor happily learning that one of his younger patients has been fully cured of tuberculosis.
Read more about this topic: Drunken Angel
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)