with the content of a given scene. In particular was his use of The Cuckoo Waltz by J. E. Jonasson. During filming, Kurosawa's father died. While he was in a sad state, he heard The Cuckoo Waltz playing in the background, and the whimsical music made him even more depressed. Kurosawa decided to use this same effect in the film, at the low point in the life of Matsunaga, when the character realizes that he was being used all along by the crime boss. Kurosawa had the sound crew find the exact recording of The Cuckoo Waltz that he had heard after his father died, and had them play the instrumental beginning of the song repeatedly for the scene in which Matsunaga walks down the street after leaving the crime boss. Kurosawa also wanted to use, in the opening scene for Okada, to have him perform on guitar "Mack the Knife", originally "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" which was a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their music drama Die Dreigroschenoper, but the studio could not afford the rights to the song. Legacy Drunken Angel has a 93% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In The Yakuza Movie Book: A Guide to Japanese Gangster Films (2003), Mark Schilling cited the film as the first to depict post-war yakuza, although he noted the movie tends to play off the yakuza film genre's common themes rather than depict them straightforwardly. References External links Movie sources Drunken Angel - Japanese With English Subtitles, online video (1 hour, 38 minutes, 14 seconds), at Archive.org Reviews DVD Review: BFI - Region 2 - PAL Essay by Jay Carr at Turner Classic Movies Commentary Drunken Angel: The Spoils of War an essay by Ian Buruma at the Criterion Collection 1948 films 1948 drama films Japanese drama films 1940s Japanese-language films Japanese black-and-white films Yakuza films Medical-themed films Best Film Kinema Junpo Award winners Toho films Films directed by Akira Kurosawa Films produced by Sōjirō Motoki Films with screenplays by Akira Kurosawa Films scored by Fumio Hayasaka Films about alcoholism Films about physicians Films about tuberculosis