Akira Kurosawa has never seen a sliding wood panel door he didn't love. In 'Ikiru', the wicked daughter-in-law character is immediately characterized by her dislike for classic style Japanese houses, and in 'Red Beard', the awful preceding doctor who introduces the hospital to our hero (Yasumoto) is immediately characterized by his dislike for poor people. They smell, he says. While 'Red Beard' is unfortunately unable to recreate smells in its form of cinematic art, it is able to lovelily paint a community. In the altruistic hospital led by a doctor known as Red Beard, played by Mifune, all workers have dedicated their lives to helping people who need it. There is a rotating cast of miserable patients, who each have sad lives, sad illnesses, and yet, the care and attention given to them by both the camera and the doctors and nurses shows they are worthy of the attention. There is not much of an overarching plot to Red Beard, one of its faults, but it has many visually and intellectually pleasing moments which glue the movie together. Some of its sequences are frankly unbelievable in terms of the intrinsic artistic quality of the filmmaking. Yasumoto though, played by Yuzo Kayama, changes his ethos so quickly, around the 1/3 point, after a brush with death with a psychotic woman, that there is not much room whatsoever for his character development afterwards. It makes the movie somewhat slow-paced, though that is not to say that all of its dramatic stakes disappear by the end. There is still the eternally relevant battle between poverty and security, and between comfort and passion.