The Quiet Duel

Another great drama by the great director with a lot of complicated but thought-provoking issues to think about.

Mifune was amazing playing a silent character who is suffering a lot from the inside but has a strong prudent heart to not to cause hurt towards others, and the supporting cast especially the nurse were great. I also liked that this film chose an unusual way (in a sense an unorthodox way as compared to other films) to not let the sufferer reveal the whole truth to people important to him even though it might have been better that way, because that is a real Asian behaviour.

The main problem I find with this film is that the first two-thirds of the film seem to have inconsistencies in its flow of plot that sort of distorted the perception of the relationships between the important characters, and things only really start to hasten and intensify during the last fraction of the film. This is okay as a story but if the flow is more refined it could have looked a little less awkward.

The Quiet Duel features Mifune's second role for Kurosawa, as a young doctor who contracts syphilis from operating on a patient in WWII South Pacific. This alone constitutes the opening and perhaps most riveting sequence of the film. In the little shack where the operation take place, effects of irritation and discomfort hit a high note with the leaking roof, pestering flies, and assaulting humidity. This shabby condition breaks Mifune's concentration and leads him to cut himself in the patient's infected blood. There is much beautiful play of light and shadow across the virginal white uniforms of the doctors.

When Mifune goes back to his father's (Takashi Shimura) medical practice in Japan after the war, the film staggers in cajoling our empathy for the hero's incredulous dilemma: How to protect his fiancee - whom he has kept waiting for six years during the war - from the syphilis he contracted abroad, yet to be honest with himself and his own physical desires. The movie strives to be the tragic love story of a sexually unfulfilled man, an Unjustifiably Tainted Virgin who pains in silence. He is so saintly that his self-denial (abstinence) inspires a single mother (Noriko Sengoku) to become a certified nurse. Despite relatively good performance from the actors, the story of a saintly individual done wrong by a disease that is symbolically social restricts itself to melodramatic proportions.

Thankfully, there is a subplot involving the patient, aka the agent of Doctor Mifune's syphilis. As irresponsible (and promiscuous) as he is, he gives syphilis to his own wife and this ends ups killing their first born. The wife is a victim in the sense that Mifune contracted his disease, and much of Kurosawa's famed humanism involves the wife's recovery from her stillborn and the promise of her eventually ridding syphilis.

This film was made just after several labor strikes broke out at Toho, Kurosawa's home studio. The strikes had devastating effects on the unity and creative synergy of film talents in Japan then, and Kurosawa made this '49 film under Daiei-- with a relatively inexperienced production unit and using a contemporary stageplay that would not alienate moviegoers. The result is vastly uneven, aside from the fantastic opening that is classic Kurosawa. Further, this film continues the cultivation of a Kurosawa-obsession: that of a saintly doctor who, despite his own faults, tries to be his most honest with the world. This can be first seen in Drunken Angel's Dr. Sanada, and later - most memorably - in Red Beard's Akahige/Dr.Niide.

When I started watching Shizukanaru kettô - The Quiet Duel I thought I was going to watch a movie with action of some sort. I quickly learned it was a pure drama movie. Not that I regretted watching it for one second.

The movie is about a young doctor that contracts syphilis during an operation during war, and his struggle against his desires and how that affect him and his surroundings. Among those people it is mostly about his fiancé and a nurse at the hospital.

I think the actors did great and Kurosawa once again succeeded in making the characters in his movie come to life and feel like real humans and tell a gripping tale.

I have to say I enjoyed the movie immensely, but I would only recommend it to people that are into drama and interested in the Japanese culture and the Japanese way in general.

As in "Drunken Angel" this film uses illness as a allegory to symbolize Japanese society after WW2. Though not as powerful "The Quiet Duel" does have some fine moments. The beginning sequence is beautifully filmed. All the Kurosawa techniques are there. The play of light, the pounding rain storm, the purposefully annoying fan, and the haunting music give this intro stunning power and make the rest of the film rather pale in comparison. The acting at times tends to be a little melodramatic but the characters are convincing even if their motives are questionable. I won't go into details. I don't want to give the story away. This film contains what I think is one of the best scenes between Mifune and Shimura. It is the magical, simple, and poignant musical cigarette box scene. An interesting point....... Watch this and then watch "Drunken Angel". Many of the same sets and props were used. Shimura's office in "Drunken Angel" and Mifune's office in "The Quiet Duel" are almost identical.

An admonitory melodrama movingly sustained by splendid acting. Toshiro Mifune would later play a different sort of strong and silent character (John Wayne's an unworthy comparison). Here the silence is pulled inward, the head often drooped, the silence a wish not to offend. No wonder it's like the female characters are pounding on the door of this tall, handsome man when he cannot open himself to them. He's doing noble work as a physician, and fortunately the sombre story is sometimes lightened with patients grateful for cure, as it is in a way by his irresponsible double with whom he shares a probably incurable infection. Well set-up scenes often beautifully photographed, like the detail of rainwater dripping into a pan during a wartime jungle operation, coming after the surgeon has asked the patient's pulse to be monitored.