Steve C
A war movie with blood, guts, death, and romance....
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/29/24
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Audience Member
Coming from the point of view of the country at risk of losing the war and tinged with a sense of fatalism, this is the kind of story which could've been wall to wall misery porn if the wrong director were put in charge of it. Fortunately, its emotional register turned out to be far more oblique than I expected it would. The portrayals of the characters finding solace from their desperate situations by getting as much out of their relationships with each other as possible resonated really well with me. Though you might not be able to control your fate, the least you can do is attempt to alleviate your fears of meeting it. This aspect isn't glossed over, nor does it overshadow the depressing parts of the film. The film instead does a good job at balancing hope and despair. Even the Stockholm syndrome bits don't feel problematic since the desperation of the characters are made as clear as day.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
william d
The Red Angel is more of an anti-war movie than a war movie. No glory or heroics here, just the gruesome aftermath of battle and a nurse struggling to survive. Although I didn't find the story to be all that good, I'm recommending it since this movie was very much ahead of its time.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
We've been covering many of Yasuzo Masumura's films — Giants and Toys, Irezumi, Black Test Car, The Black Report, Blind Beast — lately and that's because Arrow Video has been putting them out on blu ray, sometimes for the first time in the U.S.
Sakura Nishi has been sent to a field hospital in Tientsin, the frontline of Japan's war with the Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese war.
It's a losing battle filled with amputation after amputation, as well as soldiers that are emotionally and physically ruined, even going so far as to assault her when she's one of the few people who can help them. Yet even in this hell — and with the Chinese troops coming to kill everyone — she finds herself giving herself to a man with no arms, trapped in a hospital as he can't return to Japan and his wife and the public who can never know just how badly the war is actually faring and falling in love with head surgeon Dr. Okabe, who has found himself addicted to morphine.
Even when the man who attacked her comes back injured, Nishi begs Okabe to give him precious blood, but supplies are so low that hardly anyone can be given drugs or fluids. Everyone is chopped into pieces, with Nishi often holding them down so that the bonesaw can do its horrible work. Piles of severed appendages and bodies waiting to be burned prove that this field hospital is just slowing down the inevitable, just as the battles with the Chinese will soon destroy them all.
Red Angel is a brutal film. It's a punch in the face, a kick to the stomach and a hit to the brain and the people that should see it and be moved and changed by it never will.
As for you, you can grab the new Arrow Video release of Red Angel, which has new audio commentary by Japanese cinema scholar David Desser, a new video essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, a newly filmed introduction by Japanese cinema expert Tony Rayns, a trailer and image gallery.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
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Audience Member
One of the best war films I have ever seen (I am not joking), Masumura's relentless and disheartening war masterpiece is an unbelievably honest depiction of the moral implications of the desperate decisions taken by doctors, nurses, soldiers and generals under desperate circumstances, while the film also reminds us by intervals about the human condition and dignity that all of them begin to lose as the repercussions of war keep making a terrifying progress.
The protagonist is the nurse Sakura Nishi, who is send to the field hospitals in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) in 1939. Another important character is Dr. Okabe, a committed officer and surgeon who has to perform dozens of amputations and operations every day, almost arbitrarily deciding, with his scarce means, equipment and professionalism experience, who lives and who dies. The whole story revolves around the two characters. The nurse Sakura begins to get emotionally attached not only to her profession, but to the patients as well, whereas Dr. Okabe's decisions begin to get professionally affected by his morphine addiction and personal problems.
<i>Akai tenshi</i> explores war from a perspective that very few films hesitate to: that of medical assistance to the agonizing soldiers. That immediately causes the viewer to reflect in the effects of violence not only in real life - speaking in terms of the futility of war - but also from a cinematic perspective: watching violent sequences in battlefields, which are normally portrayed as action-oriented, have somehow managed to be qualified under terms of "entertainment", whereas the sights that this film shows are horrifying, full of pain, blood, gore, limbs and sicknesses. So Masumura masterfully constructs a duality between perceptions of war and pain, and between perceptions of entertainment and humanism. That is probably the greatest talent of this 1966 powerful testament.
And I say "probably", because when the film fully tackles humanism, it explores certain facets of human life that remind us of our condition with exceptional power: family, fear, patriotism, and unexpectedly, love and sexuality, reaching heights that very few movies do. Nurse Sakura suffers a serious number of transformations, from a woman that was determined to do a job, to a woman that learns how to (but is never cabable of) separating her feelings from her job, to a woman that begins to carry guilt out of the death of 4 people over her soul (whether if it was her fault or not), to a woman that finally reflects on the significance of her survival. The doctor passes from being a morphine addict that saw soldiers not as human beings, but as mere instruments of war that had to be treated for sending them back to the front lines, to a man that rediscovers that which defined him as a man and as a human being: love, which he had lost three years ago when his wife died. All he did now was facing death every day, taking decisions of life and death that should not belong to any single woman or man on Earth.
By the time we arrive to the 10-minute climactic, expertly filmed and invigorating war sequence, we no longer even explore the possibility of perceiving the sequence as entertaining. Rather, we come to the conclusion that all of the emotional devastation and discoveries, and all of the pain portrayed in the previous 85 minutes, were result of the action in the battlefield. So this sequence is scarier than it is pulse-pounding or exciting: it is horror that you wish just stopped for not increasing the number of victims and deceased people. What a bold move.
So I have to arrive to the conclusion that the greatest talent of <i>Akai tenshi</i> is that it makes people reflect on the consequences of war in a very universal way, rather than hiding its truths under biased "patriotic" statements or entertainment stunts. It is honesty and humanism disguised as a war film which chose its historical setting perfectly.
99/100
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
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Audience Member
Actually made in 1966 (not '99) this is a powerful, if flawed, anti-war film focussing on Japanese troops in China.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/22/23
Full Review
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