Kanzô sensei

Interesting if typically overlong multi-character drama with a wartime setting, about the exploits of an ageing and old-fashioned doctor (whose diagnosis for all his patients is always the same: hepatitis!) in a fishing community. Several enjoyable vignettes along the way: the young prostitute who becomes the doctor's aide but continues in her clandestine profession against his better judgment; the doctor's appearance at a Tokyo medical conference, in which he is moved to tears by the reception given him by the more illustrious colleagues present; the girl hiding an injured soldier who has escaped from a P.O.W. camp, involving the doctor and several other people from the village (who are later tortured by the authorities); the girl hunting a blue whale, in emulation of her legendary fisherman father, at the film's surprising and strangely beautiful climax - after which she and the doctor witness the historic blast of the atom bomb (which, to the latter appears in the form of an enlarged liver, a common trait of the dreaded hepatitis!).