Jazzing in the Tokyo Slum: Music, Influence, and Censorship in Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel

Akira Kurosawa’s 1948 film Drunken Angel was his first collaboration with composer Fumio Hayasaka, with whom the director would work until Hayasaka’s death. This article examines two elements that shaped the final product but have rarely been discussed: similarities between G. W. Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera (1931) and music’s function in structuring the film’s narrative. These are connected through Kurosawa’s desire to have used “The Ballad of Mack the Knife” in the film’s score.