While most Japanese movie fans may be familiar with director Masumura Yasuzo's eerie "Mojyu" (AKA Blind Beast; 1969), "Akai Tenshi" (Eng. Lit. - Red Angel) is one of the director's more somber films. Set against the backdrop of the Second Sino-Japanese War (193745) Masumura focuses on the life of a newly transferred Japanese Army medical nurse Nishi Sakura (Wakao Ayako) and the horrors she sees and experiences as she tries to cope with the human casualties of that senseless war. As Sakura sadly narrates, on the first day of her transfer to the army hospital where she is stationed, she is brutally gang raped by wounded soldiers from the front. Her tragic life doesn't get any easier as she is soon sent to an outpost even closer to the front-line. There she sees even more horrific carnage and despair. The story gets somewhat melodramatic as Sakura's encounters various patients at the outpost (Sakura meets one of the soldiers who gang raped her months earlier but who is now on the verge of dying. Sakura also meets with another soldier who has had both his arms amputated in an explosion. He tells Sakura that he was newly married before the war and now feels that he can never face his wife again. Sakura nurtures the soldier and eventually sleeps with him out of pity of his plight). In the course of her duties Sakura befriends the stoic doctor/surgeon Dr. Okabe (Ashida Shinsuke) who was head of a hospital before the war started and is now Chief Medical Officer for the Army. Although much older than she, Sakura finds herself hopelessly in love with the doctor whom strangely reminds her of her own father who had passed away when she was a child. To escape the realities of the war, Okabe has become addicted to morphine, which he has Sakura administer. Eventually Sakura helps Okabe break this addiction and soon becomes his lover. The two lovers are soon transferred to the front-line where they have to tend to a group of cholera-infected soldiers. The village that they are held up in is soon attacked by Chinese Military forces and Okabe and Sakura say their last goodbyes before getting separated. Miraculously though Sakura survives the attack but tragically finds Okabe dead. While the film touches upon a number of exploitative elements, it is surprisingly very conservative in its handling and depictions of the more salacious aspects (there is very little nudity and the sex scenes are done tastefully and without the usual gratuitousness expected from these films). The film definitely does not condone the acts of the Japanese Military of the time and goes out of its way to show the human casualties of the conflict, often in very graphic detail. War is hell and this film hammers that point across in its depictions of the war wounded and the psychological trauma these soldiers suffer.