An estimated twenty million Chinese and two million Japanese soldiers were killed in the second Sino-Japanese War that lasted from 1937-1945. If anyone thought for one moment that there was a glorious aspect to this war or any other, Yasuzo Masamura's Red Angel will dispel that forever. Written by Ryozo Kasahara and based on a novel by Yoriyoshi Arima, Red Angel is a powerful anti-war drama in which scenes of rape, dismemberment, drug withdrawal, disease, and suicide are graphically shown by Masamura, who spares nothing except the erotic details of lovemaking. Set in Manchuria in the early days of the conflict, the "red angel" in the film is Nurse Sakura Nishi played by Masamura regular Ayako Wakao.

Nurse Nishi is stationed on the battlefield as a care giver but most patients, racked by loneliness and fear of impending death, see her as a sexually available woman. On her first night while making the rounds, Nishi is gang raped and held down by the group while she is sexually assaulted by Pvt. Sakamoto (Jotaro Senba). After reporting the incident to the head nurse, Nishi learns sadly that this is something she should have expected. Transferred to the front, Nishi is stationed at an army field hospital where she assists Dr. Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida),the only available surgeon in performing amputations.

With few drugs and not enough blood available for transfusions, Okabe is forced to amputate arms and legs in hopes of saving the young men but is torn by feelings of guilt and remorse. He believes that most of the amputees would be better off dead since he knows that the Army will not let them go home because they would symbolize the idea that Japan is losing the war. Nishi pleads with Okabe to give a blood transfusion to Sakamoto, the man who had raped her during her first assignment and Okabe agrees but on the condition that Nishi comes to visit him at night. Discovering that Okabe is a man of compassion, Nishi sympathizes with his plight and begins to fall in love with him, though it cannot be expressed because the doctor is a morphine addict and is impotent.

In one of the most heart-wrenching sequences, Nurse Nishi takes pity on Pvt. Orihara (Yusuke Kawazu) who has lost both of his arms. After pleading with the young nurse to relieve him of his sexual frustration, she takes him to a hotel where he expresses his pent-up passion but the evening proves too much for him to handle. In the final and most moving segment, a cholera attack has decimated the remaining soldiers who are surrounded by Chinese troops and as death becomes closer, Nishi and Okabe vow to make every effort to preserve their humanity even through Nishi's attempt to end Okabe's morphine addiction.

Although there is romance in Red Angel, Masamura makes it quite evident that a normal relationship is impossible under conditions of war. His vision of war is one of hell where there is no honor or glory, only physical and emotional degradation and killing in the name of patriotism. Although Red Angel is lurid and has moments of melodrama, it is a brutally honest film that shows war without sentimentality, perhaps a reason for it remaining unreleased until Fantoma Films resurrected it on a widescreen DVD in 2006.

Yasuzo Masumura's "Red Angel" is one of the most extraordinary and subtly erotic (yes, erotic!) war dramas ever made, and manages to be both a deeply intimate portrait of purest love and a moving statement on the idiocy of military conflict. The late Masumura, who directed the amazing "Hanzo 2: The Snare", "Blind Beast" and "Manji", brought such intelligence and depth to every film he directed, and this is perhaps his finest work. Ayako Wakao is a revelation as Nurse Sakura Nishi, a young woman in possession of enormous humanity, who ministers to the war wounded in the most intimate of ways and falls deeply in love with Dr. Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida),a disconnected surgeon whose only escape from his blood-soaked work is a nightly armful of morphine. Although the structure is simple and the tone is unrelentingly grim, the messages are powerful and heartfelt. Nurse Nishi's short relationship with an amputee soldier is one of cinema's finest passages. The scene in which she allows the solider to "make love" to her is a textbook example of adroit direction and is devastatingly emotional. Because the film is incredibly graphic at times (especially for 1966) and stark in its depictions of war atrocities, the black and white serves to keep the bloodshed from overwhelming the drama. I can not praise this shattering achievement highly enough. It is a masterpiece of humanity.

We've been covering many of Yasuzo Masumura's films - Giants and Toys, Irezumi, Black Test Car, The Black Report, Blind Beast - lately and that's because Arrow Video has been putting them out on blu ray, sometimes for the first time in the U. S.

Sakura Nishi has been sent to a field hospital in Tientsin, the frontline of Japan's war with the Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese war.

It's a losing battle filled with amputation after amputation, as well as soldiers that are emotionally and physically ruined, even going so far as to assault her when she's one of the few people who can help them. Yet even in this hell - and with the Chinese troops coming to kill everyone - she finds herself giving herself to a man with no arms, trapped in a hospital as he can't return to Japan and his wife and the public who can never know just how badly the war is actually faring and falling in love with head surgeon Dr. Okabe, who has found himself addicted to morphine.

Even when the man who attacked her comes back injured, Nishi begs Okabe to give him precious blood, but supplies are so low that hardly anyone can be given drugs or fluids. Everyone is chopped into pieces, with Nishi often holding them down so that the bonesaw can do its horrible work. Piles of severed appendages and bodies waiting to be burned prove that this field hospital is just slowing down the inevitable, just as the battles with the Chinese will soon destroy them all.

Red Angel is a brutal film. It's a punch in the face, a kick to the stomach and a hit to the brain and the people that should see it and be moved and changed by it never will.