The third of Akira Kurosawa's Kinema Junpo winners, Red Beard is set in the latter days of the Tokugawa Shogunate (mid-nineteenth-century Japan). A young doctor full of “Dutch learning,” as Western scientific training was known, is assigned to an internship at an impoverished charity clinic run by a benevolent tyrant known as Red Beard (Toshiro Mifune), who believes it is his duty to fight poverty and neglect as well as disease, and to treat the human spirit as well as the body.