Seen in the scope of Kurosawa's career, Red Beard is a work of endings and beginnings: shot in 1965, it was his last film in the widescreen Toho-scope format, his last “master and pupil” narrative, and most remarkably of all, his last collaboration with Toshiro Mifune. Based on a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto but just as inspired by Dostoevsky's suffering-infused humanist tales (and more specifically his novel The Insulted and Injured), the film follows a nineteenth-century doctor, the towering “Red Beard” (Mifune), as he works to cure not only the physical ailments of his patients, but also the social and economic problems that beget them. A brash younger doctor (Yuzo Kayama) works at his side, witnessing the great doctor's small victories (and much larger rages). The film's breathtakingly expansive production prefigures the grandeur of the films that Kurosawa would soon begin making, but Red Beard is still at heart an intimate human story, one given flesh and blood by Mifune's fiery performance.