THE HiGH & LOW PODCAST, EPiSODE 35: Red Beard.

"The pain and loneliness of death frighten me. But Dr. Niide looks at it differently. He looks into their hearts as well as their bodies."

The Pink Smoke’s Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs recently appeared on High and Low: A Kurosawa Podcast to discuss Akira Kurosawa's intense masterpiece Red Beard, a film about a young doctor reluctantly assigned to work at a free clinic in Tokugawa-era Japan.

The film's episodic structure follows the brash and arrogant young doctor's tutelage under the harsh and enigmatic Dr. Akahige, played by Toshiro Mifune (in his final collaboration with Kurosawa.) The group discusses how Red Beard marks the end of an era in the filmmaker's work and represents the farthest he could take his style in a certain direction - it's a lively, digressive conversation which mentions John Carpenter's The Ghosts of Mars far more frequently than you ever would've guessed.

~ MARCH 18, 2017 ~