Red Beard (Akahige) marks a turning point in Akira Kurosawa's career: It was his last black and white film, the last to be shot with widescreen cameras (subsequent films being shot in 1.85 to 1 ratio to accommodate television better), and the last he ever filmed with alter ego Toshirô Mifune (after working with him in sixteen films). Kurosawa's last "hero" film, featuring characters that undergo spiritual growth and enlightenment, Red Beard signaled the end of the legendary filmmaker's popular appeal and he found it difficult to find funding the rest of his life. Although Kurosawa had directed twenty-four films between 1943 and 1965, he headed up only seven more film projects in the final three decades of his life.

Classics like Seven Samurai, Ikiru, and Rashomon stand far atop Kurosawa's works, but the less-viewed and less-critically heralded Red Beard showcases Kurosawa's unsurpassed cinematic style and artistically features familiar Kurosawa themes very satisfyingly. Now that the Criterion Collection definitively preserves the three-hour epic with a crystal clear 2.35:1 aspect ratio transfer to DVD, Kurosawa's overlooked masterpiece should receive more attention. Besides the beautifully restored visual quality (minus thousands of flaws caused by dirt, debris, and scratches), the audio has been cleaned up digitally, reducing the hisses and pops from analog. Kurosawa film scholar Stephen Prince adds greatly to the DVD's value with perceptive audio commentary about the filmmaker's techniques, film background, and thematic elements.

Kurosawa began the project after finishing 1962's Sanjuro, also based on the writings of Shugoro Yamamoto. After reading Yamamoto's Red Beard, Kurosawa thought it could be adapted into a script for another Japanese director. He wanted to direct the material himself, however, as he wrote and incorporated material from Dostoevsky's The Insulted and the Injured and from his own experience.

Although historically based, Kurosawa doesn't dwell on educating viewers on the background. Red Beard begins with young Noboru Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama) paying a formal visit to the Koishikawa Public Clinic, run by Dr. Kyojio Niide (played by Toshiro Mifune and more commonly called Red Beard). Yasumoto has studied several years at the Dutch medical schools in Nagasaki, and now learns that he is to intern at the clinic. These schools actually did exist in the port city of Nagasaki in the 17th and 18th centuries, where the Dutch were often called "red hair" and this became a melding of western medicine with the philosophy of eastern medicine, which firmly believed that illness was symptomatic of deeper emotional and psychological disorders.

Yasumoto's unreliable guide hates the place and its poverty-stricken clients and negatively paints the clinic as a horrible place to work and describes Red Beard as a dictator. Others disagree, but one thing is clear: Red Beard must be a charismatic leader since everyone talks about him. It's a full ten minutes before we finally meet him on screen. Kurosawa builds the suspense further by photographing Mifune from the back initially, before he slowly faces his new intern face to face. At this point the audience is unsure what to think of the clinic director, and his stern, stoic stare lends to the ambiguity.

Yasumoto, unhappy with his assignment, shows his displeasure. He boycotts his first supper, violates the hospital rules, stubbornly refuses to wear his uniform, and insists on hanging around the forbidden area where the insane patient called the “Mantis” (Kyoko Kagawa) is sequestered. Yasumoto, proud of his medical training, thinks that Red Beard just wants to steal his medical notes, at one point bragging to nurse Osugi (Reiko Dan) that he knows more about medicine than the elder doctor, adapting western knowledge but more versed in eastern beliefs about the spiritual and psychological nature of illness. As Red Beard states,

"Medical science doesn't know everything. We know the symptoms and how things go...We can only fight poverty and ignorance, and cover up what we don't know. If it weren't for poverty, half of these people wouldn't be sick."