Red Beard

Red Beard follows Noboru Yasumoto, a young doctor who returns to Edo after studying Western medicine in Nagasaki and expects a prestigious appointment. Instead, he is assigned to a clinic for the poor, run by a demanding older physician nicknamed Red Beard. Resentful of the rough manners and strict discipline of his new superior, Yasumoto rebels against the clinic and its routines. Over time he comes to see that Red Beard's harsh exterior conceals deep compassion, and he learns what the practice of medicine means for people who have nowhere else to turn. The film is set in early nineteenth-century Japan and is based on a story by Shugoro Yamamoto, with inspiration also drawn from Dostoevsky's novel The Insulted and Humiliated.

Akira Kurosawa directed and co-wrote the film with Hideo Oguni and Ryuzo Kikushima, and Tomoyuki Tanaka and Kikushima produced it for TOHO and Kurosawa Production. It is the seventeenth of the twenty-three films Kurosawa directed in chronological order, coming after High and Low and before Dersu Uzala. Toshiro Mifune plays Dr. Kyojio Niide, with Yuzo Kayama as Yasumoto; the credited cast runs to fifty-six performers, among them Tsutomu Yamazaki, Reiko Dan, Miyuki Kuwano and Kyoko Kagawa.

Red Beard runs 185 minutes and earned about 1 million dollars worldwide. On IMDb it holds 8.3 out of 10 from roughly 23,000 votes, and on TMDB 8.2 out of 10 from 428 votes. A critics' rating of 7.5 out of 10 from fifteen reviews places it somewhat below the audience scores.