RASHOMON is one of Kurosawa's darkest, most cynical films, but there's something about its ending that plants a seed of hope that really won't get watered, nourished and harvested till RED BEARD. If you recall, the woodcutter finds and saves an abandoned baby during a torrential downpour. It's a remarkable moment. Everything up to that point has been pretty stormy and pessimistic, clouded through a subjective mist of lies, despair and uncertainty. But the ending's moralistic adoption of a child suggests there is not only some bastion of hope for the future, there's also a way to care for the suspicion of the world if we work to alleviate the suffering of others. So powerful is the ending to RASHOMON, you can't help but feel Kurosawa wanted to articulate that hope with greater clarity and compassion, and that's exactly what he does for 3 hours in RED BEARD —his most spiritual, life-affirming film next to IKIRU. 

RED BEARD lays bear the goodness of humanity even more than IKIRU. The harsh, absurd world in need of remedy is still present, but the existential longing and thirst for meaning fades to an overwhelming optimism that somehow manages to never turn sentimental. So many of Kurosawa's films in fact have a penchant for what is dour (THE LOWER DEPTHS, THE BAD SLEEP WELL, THRONE OF BLOOD, HIGH AND LOW) that it's kinda nice to see him work in a wheelhouse opposite of "evil begets evil." If anything, RED BEARD is firmly committed to the healer's art and believes that "good begets good." There might be death and sickness and disease all around us, but there are still good-hearted people who choose hope over bitterness, patience over despair. As Ritchie contends: "the world in which we live may indeed be a hell, but good is just as infectious as evil." 

What's amazing about Red Beard is how possessed, consumed and hard-boiled he is for promoting the good. He's a doctor who's seen all the gloom and doom humanity can offer. He bears not even the slightest trace of cynicism in his countenance. He's old, wise, and experienced beyond years, and he always sees beyond the trauma of his patients to the cure that will make them whole, as if prophetically recognizing the potential in others they don't see in themselves. To borrow the language of Socrates, Red Beard is not only good himself, but the cause of goodness in others. I love how contagious his goodness is. He heals Yasumoto, Yasumoto then heals Otoyo. Otoyo heals Yasumoto when he falls ill, which leads her to heal the thieving boy. Everybody mends everybody else. The healer's art literally presses on these characters like electricity crackling through their nerves, awakening them to powers they never knew they could possess. 

The hospital isn't a place where diagnoses and prescriptions are dished out, but where suffering gets spiritualized into a social process that involves intense patience, care, love and kindness. 

Healing comes when one lives for others. We see examples of this everywhere, but one of my favorite moments is when Red Beard goes full-blown Yojimbo and begins kicking samurai ass on all the child sex-traffickers. I like to think this moment weighed in on Scorsese/Schrader during the bloody climax of TAXI DRIVER, another story that uses a badass to assassinate pimps and cronies in order to rescue a young girl from a life of sex enslavement. Red Beard isn't Travis Bickle though, he severely maims but doesn't kill these bad dudes. He even thinks he went too far, and immediately begins applying the healer's art to dress their wounds. It's a tacit recognition that even the vilest people in the world are sick and in need of healing. Another moment that took my breath away: Otoyo, the 12-year old sex slave, has been rescued and taken into the hospital, but she refuses her medicine when Yasumoto tries to spoon feed her. He tries a few times, but each time she splashes it in his face. Red Beard, the master jedi, then comes in and sits with her for what seems like an eternal take of trying-and-failing, trying-and-failing, until FINALLY he delivers the goods to her soul. Yasumoto will learn from this experience that patience and perseverance are divine gifts: the twin-pillars of empathy at its most effective. I got emotional watching this scene just thinking about how desperately needed these traits are in today's world of impatience, hot takes, sound-bytes and 280-character tweets. 

We seem to be in shortage of Red Beards in the world today. We're all sick, hurting and traumatized in so many ways. We need a social institution like the one presented here that can work with us to properly heal and help us recover from our wounds. In Red Beard the character, Kurosawa seems to believe that true healing occurs when we transfigure our sickness into the work of alleviating the sickness of others. Losing oneself means finding oneself. Sick people learn empathy by taking care of other sick people, and so on and so forth until all are rejuvenated. 

Kurosawa took the final paragraph of RASHOMON and harvested a motherlode of compassion from the infancy of its message. I almost want to say these two films work as the best companions, because from the first we're told that the world is a scary, fractured, deceptive place where people can't be trusted, whereas the second tells us to nourish those scary, fractured, deceptive people until they become whole.

Kurosawa Ranked