It's an Akira Kurosawa film starring Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura... and it's garbage.

Toshiro Mifune plays a doctor, Fujisaki, who during the war picked up a scalpel by the wrong end during surgery. It wasn't his fault. Everyone was exhausted, the heat was fearsome, the rain was thundering down and wounded soldiers never stopped arriving. Anyway, the cut on his finger gave him syphilis from the patient on the operating table. Fujisaki's never had sex and it's possible that now he never will, because he's a man with the highest moral standards and on returning from the war refuses to marry his fiancee of six years (Miki Sanjo).

Does he say why, though? Nope. (She's distraught and begging for him to explain, assuming that it's her fault somehow and that he must have stopped loving her.) Does he tell anyone at all? Nope, not even his father (Takashi Shimura), who's also a doctor. In one scene he semi-confesses with the following:

"Suppose... there is a man. This is just an assumption. It can be a man or a woman. The person... the body of the person... is pure, but not pure. It's dirty. Have you ever imagined those kinds of conditions?"

Unsurprisingly, Sanjo doesn't work it out from that. Later, dad learns about the syphilis anyway and confronts him. "Tell her!" says dad, after the obvious misunderstandings have been cleared up. Nope, our hero still refuses.

MIFUNE: "It might take three or five years to heal it. I was sent to many places during the war. Without medicine, my disease worsened. How old is Misao?"

SHIMURA: "Twenty seven. But, Kyoji... I think... you should tell Misao everything. So that Misao can forget about you."

MIFUNE: "I can't tell her that. I thought of it a lot. But I can't tell her."

SHIMURA: "Why?"

MIFUNE: "If I tell her everything... I know she'll say she'll wait for me for five or ten years until I heal. I can't do that to her. I know Misao will wait. She is such a woman. I don't have the courage to take away her life like that!"

That's half a reason, but it doesn't explain why he didn't tell his father. I understand. He's embarrassed, isn't he? He doesn't want to say the word "syphilis". Ironically, though, that shouldn't have been a reason not to get married. It's not even an insurmountable bedroom problem. Use condoms (carefully) or something. You certainly can't catch it from toilet seats, daily activities or even sharing eating utensils. Having children would be out of the question for a while, but that's all. Admittedly, the disease was a bigger deal back then and had once been regarded as almost incurable, but penicillin was confirmed as an effective treatment in trials in 1943. (Mifune here is actually treating himself with arsphenamine, i.e. an out-of-date treatment. Thus, on top of everything else, our hero has even missed a trick as a doctor, because he's not following latest medical developments in a matter of the utmost importance to him personally.)

Thus the film's tragedy fails because our hero's a twat. "Tell her," I was saying. Tell her. Piss off, then come back and bloody well tell her. I was headbutting the walls. You're both miserable because you're keeping secret a medical condition that's manageable if you're sensible about it. We're expected to admire him. He's called a "saint among doctors". Nope, not as far as I'm concerned. The time when he's most tempted to tell her is after he'd broken off their engagement and she's going to marry someone else the next day. COME OFF IT, MATE. You've hitherto been a pillar of stupid-but-exemplary morality, but that wouldn't have been okay.

The most watchable character is a grumpy nurse played by Noriko Sengoku (another Akira Kurosawa stalwart). She doesn't want to be here. She didn't have enough money for an abortion and she wanted to commit suicide, so Mifune gave her a job. He hasn't fixed her pregnancy, though, so she's unimpressed. She's actually fun to watch and has a character journey. (Mind you, the bloke who gave Mifune syphilis is also startling and quite a piece of work.)

This film was adapted from a successful stage play. That doesn't matter. Avoid it. The film thinks it's a tragedy, but it's a 94-minute study of a twat. Mifune's performance is excellent, unsurprisingly, but undermined by the character setting himself on a pointless course that's unnecessarily hurting everyone, including himself. He's stoic, self-sacrificing and stupid. This film would merely have been slow and depressing if I'd cared about Mifune, but I didn't.