Before making his global reputation with epic period pieces from Japan’s samurai past, Akira Kurosawa made movies for domestic consumption in a Japan recovering from the trauma and ruin of fascism and the world war that their militaristic state started.

“Stray Dog” and “Drunken Angel” have value as early genre pictures that capture bombed-out Japan at its postwar low-ebb. Films like “Scandal,” “Those Who Make Tomorrow” and “The Quiet Duel” have their melodramatic elements, and seem to be re-teaching the culture its values in an ethically unmoored era under American occupation.

“The Quiet Duel” (1949) employs two of the master filmmaker’s favorite actors, Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune, as father and son physicians practicing medicine in a country wracked by shortages and an unrecovered supply chain, grappling with notions of honor, reputation and doing the right thing when confronted by the “shame” of venereal disease.

Based on a play from that era, it presents a tightly-confined world — a hospital — and moral absolutes, taking the noble path when the “worst” happens, even if it shatters your dreams and those of the woman you love.

Claustrophobic, symbolic and emotional, “The Quiet Duel” (“Shizukanaru kettô”) tells an intimate story with efficiency and tenderness, even if it isn’t the timeless crowd-pleaser that many of the films that followed Kurosawa’s global breakthrough, “Rashomon” (1950) were and remain.

We meet Dr. Kyoji Fujisaki (Mifune) asleep on his feet, passed-out between waves of wounded at a rainy jungle Imperial Army field hospital. His round-the-clock work has him taking shortcuts in the frantic effort to get to every patient. That’s why his gloves are off when he operates on one soldier. The man’s wounds are one thing, but when the doctor nicks his finger, mid-operation, the fact that the soldier has syphilis means the consequences could be dire.

It’s only later, after returning home to the hospital that his OB-GYN father (Shimura) runs that he gets himself tested. Facing years of treatment with a drug in short supply, Kyoji takes on a chaste, resolute determination to do right by his patient fiance of six years, Misao (Kyoji Fujisaki). That means that he must break things off and not tell her the reason he does.

The sexual stain of this illness is such that even the pregnant, unmarried apprentice nurse Minegishi (Noriko Sengoku) looks down on him, because she “never fell that far.” But her judgment turns more pitying, as does his father’s, when word gets around how Dr. Kyoghi Fujisaki met this fate.

When he crosses paths with the very soldier (Kenjirô Uemura) who infected him, Kyogi makes it his mission to lecture (in Japanese with English subtitles) the lout on proper treatment and the simple humanity of avoiding passing this curse on to an unsuspecting woman. “Think about other people!” Too late. The drunken creep has married and impregnated an unsuspecting wife, heedless of consequences, even when he learns them.

Everybody suffers, but the “responsible” and “honorable” doctor suffers most of all, bearing this burden, sneaking those injections and struggling to do the right thing as he throws himself into his work. Not that he carries this weight in silent good humor.

“My stupid conscience!”

Kurosawa takes us into a world of limited horizons, aptly presented in monochrome — shortages, privation, patients who can’t afford to pay for their care in a ruined grey and white city still rebuilding from carpet bombing.

The message the play and the film of it sends is that it’s only by diligence, compassion and thinking of others and society as a whole can the people pull themselves out of this.

The technique on display here is surehanded but rudimentary compared to Kurosawa’s later work. One arresting tracking shot grabs your attention, and a simple frame of the weather hitting an old ironwork fence depicts the change of seasons and the passage of years.

The performances have a hint of soap opera weepiness about them, but Mifune and Shimura hint at the international icons they would become, and Sengoku and Sanjô give us a taste of the long careers each had in her future, with Sengoku becoming a Kurosawa favorite (“Seven Samurai,” “I Live in Fear,” etc).

The murky print that the free streamer Tubi is using right now should be a candidate for restoration. But it’s clear enough for us to see the talent, if not the future genius, behind “The Quiet Duel,” a filmmaker who documented Japan as he knew it and a Japan he hoped it would be before turning to its epic past for his greatest works.

Rating: TV-PG, adult subject matter

Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Miki Sanjô, Noriko Sengoku and Kenjirô Uemura

Credits: Directed by Akira Kurosawa, scripted by Akira Kurosawa and Senkichi Taniguchi, based on a play by Kazuo Kikuta. An Art Film Association release on Tubi.

Running time: 1:35