Drunken Angel

There is a scene at the end of Drunken Angel an Akira Kurosawa film starring Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune (both later in the Seven Samurai) where two gangsters get into a fight to the death. They’re both scared and desperate, and the fight is an awkward, scrambling affair where both are unwilling to commit too fully to an attack. What struck me was how real it looked.

The film is all overly dramatic really (it is about a drunk doctor trying to save a yakuza with TB), but at the same time I couldn’t help but imagine how Hollywood would have handled that scene and how many people honestly think that fights, especially between 'trained killers' look like this: