Overview: Directed by Yasuzo Masumura (Giants and Toys, Blind Beast), Red Angel takes an unflinching look at the horror and futility of war through the eyes of a dedicated and selfless young military nurse.

When Sakura Nishi is dispatched in 1939 to a ramshackle field hospital in Tientsin, the frontline of Japan’s war with China, she and her colleagues find themselves fighting a losing battle tending to the war-wounded and emotionally shellshocked soldiers while assisting head surgeon Dr Okabe conduct an unending series of amputations.

As the Chinese troops close in, she finds herself increasingly drawn to Okabe who, impotent to stall the mounting piles of cadavers, has retreated into his own private hell of morphine addiction.

Blu-ray Verdict: Adapted from the novel by Yorichika Arima, Masumura’s harrowing portrait of women and war is considered the finest of his collaborations with Ayako Wakao (A Wife Confesses, Irezumi) and features startling monochrome scope cinematography by Setsuo Kobayashi (Fires on the Plain, An Actor’s Revenge).

In truth, I was quite simply blown away by this movie. It is incredibly beautiful and moving, and more importantly is genuinely unique to my knowledge in its approach.

I know of no other movie which has linked sexuality (it is a surprisingly sensual and erotic movie) to warfare in this way. It is also incredibly rich thematically, there is enough in this movie for a few PhDs!

The story is superficially quite simple. Nurse Sakura Nishi is posted to an army hospital in the Manchurian War, Japans war of aggression in China that some historians see as part of the initial states of WWII.

The hospital takes a ruthless approach to the injured solders, it is a case of patch them up, and get them back to the front. The amputee cases are packed off to secured hospitals in China, so the public at home never get to see with their own eyes the result of the bitter warfare.

A soldier rapes Nurse Nishi, but this is treated coldly as a minor matter by the authorities, the solder is simply packed back to the front early as a punishment. Nurse Nishi seems to treat it as part of the job.

In a remarkable sequence, Nurse Nishi cares for an armless soldier who pines for his wife at home, but realizes the military top brass will never let him return to Japan.

She cares for him, and even relieves him sexually. This is where the movie comes closest to its exploitation origins, but it is handled in a very sensitive way - Masumuru shows his incredible skill and control of the material here.

Nurse Nishi is sent to the front lines. Here she meets and falls in love with an embittered, morphine addicted doctor, Dr. Okabe. He is brutally casual with her love, knowing that they can never have a normal life together, but she slowly reaches into her humanity.

They are both then sent to a small outpost, about to be over run by advancing Chinese Nationalist soldiers. They know they are doomed - this realization opens them both up, and in further remarkable scenes they play with their role as officer and nurse, as she dresses up in his uniform and orders him around.

In the hands of a lesser director and actors this would be painful to watch, but again its handled beautifully and says more about the nature of the military, power exchange between men and women, and Japanese society than numerous other entire movies.

The movie is very brutal - it will be hard to get from your mind the images of piles of amputated limbs and the despair of soldiers who know they are on a virtual suicide mission in a war they don’t understand.

It is relentlessly anti war except for the end, where there is a more conventional set up of the Japanese soldiers defending bravely against overwhelming odds.

The movie can be criticized for an under emphasis on the roots of the war and the brute racism of the Japanese army at the time. Also, the comfort women in the movie are portrayed as Chinese prostitutes, not the sex slaves which most historians believe they were. But these are relatively minor quibbles with a movie that is relentless in its portrayal of war.

In summation, I would highly recommend anyone watching this brand-new-to Blu-ray film to see the contemporary trailer alone! It is pure exploitation fodder, obviously trying to get an audience who think it will show kinky goings on in a war hospital, almost in a Carry on Nurse type way!

Perhaps this is how Masumura sold it to his studio. This may also have influenced his decision on certain scenes, but there is no doubt that this movie deserves to be on any list of best war movies, or best Japanese movies. This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.78:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with the Special Features of:

High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
Original uncompressed Japanese mono audio
Optional English subtitles
Brand new audio commentary by Japanese cinema scholar David Desser
Newly filmed introduction by Japanese cinema expert Tony Rayns
Not All Angels Have Wings, a new visual essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Original Trailer
Image Gallery
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tony Stella