Stray Dog (1949)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

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  Stray Dog was developed from an unpublished novel which Kurosawa had previously written, partly out of his love for pulp crime fiction, partly out of a desire to recreate for himself the distinctive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.

Film Synopsis

In post-war Tokyo, a trainee cop Murakami becomes obsessed with recovering his Colt pistol when it is stolen by a pickpocket.  Disguised as a down-at-heel war veteran, he scours the backstreets of the city, without success.  When a crime is committed with the stolen gun, Murakami offers to resign, but his police chief assigns him to work alongside a more experienced detective, Sato.  The two men soon discover that Murakami's Colt was bought by a gun dealer, Honda, from whom they learn that the gun is now in the possession of Yusa, a war veteran turned criminal.  Sato follows Yusa's trail to his present hideout, not realising that the next bullet in Murakami's pistol has his name on it...