The Quiet Duel

During the war the young surgeon Kyoji is operating in a field hospital. Exhausted, he cuts his finger, and the blood of the soldier on the table gets into the wound; the soldier has syphilis. Kyoji takes the disease. The war ends, he goes home and starts work at his father's clinic. His fiancee has waited for years. He breaks the engagement without telling her anything. He tells nobody; not the girl, not the patients, not the nurse. The treatment is long and through it he bears his own decision alone. Akira Kurosawa directs and adapted the script from a play by Kazuo Kikuta. Toshiro Mifune plays Kyoji and Takashi Shimura his father. It is a Japanese production. Mifune here is nothing like his roles with a sword or in a rage; the character is quiet and holds himself in. The matter it treats is silence; the man chooses to hurt nobody by not telling the truth, and the choice hurts everybody. The film shows the poverty of postwar Japan through the clinic. The narrative does not deliver its moral outright, but it draws the character as too virtuous. The return of the soldier who passed on the disease is the hardest passage in the film. The nurse is the film's second line and that line is livelier. The narrative happens largely indoors and has the smell of the stage. The ending gives no coming together. Its limit is melodrama; the narrative exalts sacrifice, the pace is slow, and some scenes are didactic. Who it is for: viewers curious about early Kurosawa and postwar Japanese drama. Who it is not for: it is slow, moralising, and the ending sad.