Film Review
The crime novels of Georges Simenon and the film noir thrillers of
Jules Dassin provided the main inspiration for Akira Kurosawa's first
cinematic masterpiece, which he made just a couple of years before he
had his international breakthrough with
Rashomon
(1950).
Stray Dog was
developed from an unpublished novel which Kurosawa had previously
written, partly out of his love for pulp crime fiction, partly out of a
desire to recreate for himself the distinctive atmosphere of Simenon's
novels. Kurosawa had made one notable crime film before this -
Drunken Angel (1948) - which
drew on a number of sources, in particular American film noir and
Italian neo-realism. These same influences can be felt in
Stray Dog, although on this
occasion the result is far more impressive - a slick, well-paced noir
thriller that vividly evokes the moral and economic climate of Japan in
the immediate aftermath of WWII.
Having successfully employed them on
Drunken
Angel and
The Silent Duel, Kurosawa
brings together his two favourite actors, Toshirô Mifune and
Takashi Shimura, for a third time, in what is arguably their most
successful pairing, as a chalk-and-cheese crime-fighting duo. The
two actors complement one another as well as you might expect, Shimura
playing the older, wiser established cop, Mifune cast as the younger,
more idealistic, more impulsive rookie. It is a pairing that
would be repeated
ad infinitum
in crime films and television series the world over from the mid-1960s
(when the film was first widely seen in the West), and Kurosawa
probably wasn't the first director to use the buddy cop formula - Jean
Renoir's
La Nuit du carrefour (1932) may
have set the ball rolling with the legendary Simenon partnership of
Maigret and Lucas.
The moral dichotomy that is at the heart of
Stray Dog is encapsulated in the
two contrasting cops. The question Kurosawa wants us to ponder
is: does a man become a criminal as a result of environmental factors,
or is he simply born evil? Shimura's character, Sato, is firmly
of the opinion that all bad men are bad when they come out of their
mother's womb - they are like mad dogs, incapable of reform. The
best we can do with their kind is to hunt them down and take them out
of circulation. Mifune's character, Murakami, takes a more sympathetic
line and argues, quite convincingly, that a good man can be driven into
a life of crime by misfortune and ill-treatment. You might
conclude that Kurosawa's own opinion on the matter is much nearer to
Murakami's, as the younger cop is ultimately more successful in
tracking down the criminal Yusa, perhaps because he recognises
something of himself in Yusa's predicament (both are war veterans who
still carry the scars of their wartime experiences). Exactly the
same moral conundrum is replayed in Kurosawa's later crime drama,
High
and Low (1963).
As in most of Kurosawa's subsequent films, the climate and the elements
play a crucial part in setting the mood of the film. Throughout
Stray Dog, every character is
visibly suffering under an unrelenting heat wave (as the cast and crew
were whilst making the film). Sweat pours off the characters,
drenching their clothes, and they are forever mopping their brows or
fanning themselves in a vain attempt to keep cool. All this
creates a sense of suffocating oppression, adding to the tension and
crushing nihilism which are effectively sustained by the moody
chiaroscuro lighting and an ominous score, both of which take their cue
from American film noir at its most atmospheric. The more
dramatic scenes are played under a barrage of torrential rain, as in so
many of Kurosawa's subsequent films, as if to constantly remind us how
puny and insignificant man is when compared with the awesome, unbending
power of nature.
Kurosawa claimed that, whilst making this film, he was most influenced
by Jules Dassin's
The Naked City (1948), and this
is apparent in the plot similarities (both involve a dogged hunt for a
killer through a stifling urban jungle) and also in the skilful
juxtaposition of neo-realist and film noir styles. The
centrepiece of Kurosawa's film is an eight-minute long dialogue-free
montage sequence which follows Mifune's character into the grimier and
sleazier precincts of Tokyo, to encounter all manner of human detritus
in the bombed out carcass of the city. Whilst this sequence is
perhaps a few minutes overlong, it does convey a powerful sense of the
moral decay and economic hardship that afflicted Japan in the late
1940s, the festering wounds from which criminality - and the Yakuza
gangster cult - was apt to spring.
There is far less humour in
Stray Dog
than in many of Kurosawa's other films. Apart from the sequence
near the start of the film where Murakami stubbornly trails the woman
he thinks stole his gun, looking like a fan stalking a movie star,
there is very little to laugh at. In fact, the film contains some
of the darkest moments of any Kurosawa film - including a climactic
showdown which is almost too nerve-wracking to watch. Whilst
Kurosawa was disappointed with
Stray
Dog and considered it one of his least favourite films, it is by
any standards a major achievement - easily one of the most accomplished
examples of film noir to have been made outside Hollywood and a
harbinger of the slew of cinematic marvels that Kurosawa was yet to put
his signature to.
© James Travers 2012
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Next Akira Kurosawa film:
The Silent Duel (1949)