Review of The Red Angel

Yasuzo Masumura's "Red Angel" is one of the most extraordinary and subtly erotic (yes, erotic!) war dramas ever made, and manages to be both a deeply intimate portrait of purest love and a moving statement on the idiocy of military conflict. The late Masumura, who directed the amazing "Hanzo 2: The Snare", "Blind Beast" and "Manji", brought such intelligence and depth to every film he directed, and this is perhaps his finest work. Ayako Wakao is a revelation as Nurse Sakura Nishi, a young woman in possession of enormous humanity, who ministers to the war wounded in the most intimate of ways and falls deeply in love with Dr. Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida), a disconnected surgeon whose only escape from his blood-soaked work is a nightly armful of morphine. Although the structure is simple and the tone is unrelentingly grim, the messages are powerful and heartfelt. Nurse Nishi's short relationship with an amputee soldier is one of cinema's finest passages. The scene in which she allows the solider to "make love" to her is a textbook example of adroit direction and is devastatingly emotional. Because the film is incredibly graphic at times (especially for 1966) and stark in its depictions of war atrocities, the black and white serves to keep the bloodshed from overwhelming the drama. I can not praise this shattering achievement highly enough. It is a masterpiece of humanity.