On the first day of making his 1965 Red Beard, which plays at the Brattle this Sunday and Monday, October 13 and 14, Akira Kurosawa rounded up the cast and crew at Tokyo’s Toho Studios and played an LP of the jubilant last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. Donald Richie in The Films of Kurosawa quotes the filmmaker as telling everyone, "This was the way the audience was supposed to feel when it walked out of the theatre."

Red Beard, an intense morality tale set in a 19th-century hospital for indigent patients, needed to be "so magnificent that people would just have to see it." But Kurosawa’s Greed-like ambitions precipitated a longer-than-Eyes-Wide-Shut two-year shoot. Several young actors who played psychotic characters teetered on the edge of nervous breakdowns. Yuzo Kayama, as a callow young doctor who grows to care unselfishly for the hospitalized poor, became frustrated and confused because his scenes of character change were shot endlessly, and completely out of sequence. "It was simply back-breaking," he told a reporter.

There were problems with Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa’s favorite actor. He felt like a captive on the set; he was wanted for other films, yet Kurosawa kept him tied up as Kyojio Niide, the red-bearded, tough-minded head physician of the Koishikawa Public Clinic. In the end their collaboration, which had gone back to 1948, was ruined. Mifune, the heart and muscle of Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and The Lower Depths, would never make another Kurosawa film.

Was all this strife worthwhile? There are those who count Red Beard among Kurosawa’s masterpieces. I am not among them. The black-and-white widescreen compositions (in Tohoscope!) are impeccable, the 19th-century sets, including the hospital and a brothel, are superb creations; and there’s one happy five-minute burst of bone-crunching violence in which Mifune (having a Yojimbo flashback?) takes on a crowd of thugs. Otherwise, every earnest scene in this movie drags. When Red Beard is finally, finally over, it’s hard to believe that a mere three hours and five minutes have passed.

What happens in these turtle-paced 185 minutes? The young doctor learns compassion. A patient, a young girl brutalized by life among prostitutes, learns to trust people and reach out. A little boy learns that stealing is a bad thing. The film starts wise and stays wise. It’s basic Doctor Kildare/Ben Casey pap, a clichŽ’d medical melodrama in which a wet-behind-the-ears young doctor becomes a trustworthy physician after first resenting, then deeply respecting, his grizzled, hospital-vet mentor.

Far more original, though also painfully long, is Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well (1960), which is at the Brattle October 14. This is said to be Coppola’s favorite Kurosawa film, and that makes sense: it’s a Godfather-like tale of a tight family whose wealth is built on high crime and murderous capitalism — not the Mafia but a Tokyo corporation that’s the locus of greed and corruption. The head CEO (Masayuki Mori) is a bastard at work but a lovely guy at home, sweet to his offspring and happiest when he’s working the grill.

In this one, Mifune is a kind of Clark Kent, in glasses, tie, and suit. By day, he’s the CEO’s loyal secretary, and newly married to the boss’s crippled daughter. In secret, as we learn an hour into the film, he has infiltrated this rotten corporation in order to get revenge for the death of his father, who, five years earlier, had been pushed out a window by his business cohort.

Do the bad sleep well? Sometimes, but mostly this film is filled with gloom and guilty consciences, and with modern-day echoes of Hamlet and Macbeth: tainted avengers and sleepwalkers, and oh what a cynical ending!

HENRY SHEEHAN wrote about film for the Phoenix in the 1980s before moving to LA and becoming the respected film critic for the Orange County Register. Earlier this year, he was bumped in a lowly cost-saving move, replaced by a wire-service person. Down but not out, he’s started a free Web site, for which he’s reviewing new movies and DVDs. In my opinion, Henrysheehan.com goes right to the top of on-line sites, providing insights from a real professional with a relish for the history of movies. When you log on, begin by reading his fabulous 1970s interview with MGM musical director Vincente Minnelli, which is published here for the first time.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com