This film about doctors working in a 19th-century public clinic marked the end of Kurosawa's greatest and most prolific period as a filmmaker. It's his last black-and-white film and the last time that he worked with Toshiro Mifune.
Mifune plays Kyojo Niide, a physician on the vanguard of medical science, and the story focuses on his tutelage of a younger doctor, Noboru Yasumoto (played by Yuzo Kayama), who learns that he can do much good working in Niide's clinic with the poor and wretched in Tokugawa society.
The film was a big hit in Japan but has been somewhat undervalued in the West. It is a luminous and grandly ambitious achievement in which Kurosawa shows for the last time the kind of heroes, like Kambei (SEVEN SAMURAI) and Watanabe (IKIRU), meant as role models for the audience, and the moral necessity of helping others that had been central to his work since the late 1940s. After this, there would be no more heroes in his works, and his filmmaking entered a very pessimistic phase that lasted for the next two decades. With RED BEARD, Kurosawa brings to an end much that had been inspiring in his work, and for that reason alone the film would compel attention. But it is also superb filmmaking; Kurosawa was working at the peak of his powers and created images and episodes that approach the sublime. These include the earthquake scene (Kurosawa had witnessed the horrific earthquake of 1923 that ravaged Tokyo) and the death scenes of two of the clinic's patients, Sahachi and Rokusuke, filmed by Kurosawa with mystery and a sense of majesty.
-- Stephen Prince
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"I had something special in mind when I made this film ... I wanted to make something that my audience would want to see, something so magnificent that people would just have to see it."
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From KUROSAWA.
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