Stray Dog
Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is a scorching police procedural that manages extraordinary tension and a deliciously dark noir vibe all at once. The movie is so much more than a detective story, telling an engrossing tale of the underworld in post-war Japan that few other pictures have captured even to this day. Kurosawa, who wrote the script in the form of a novel initially, didn’t end up liking his finished picture, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of his most compelling films.
Stray Dog came out before Kurosawa really had broken out in the West with a string of historical epics. At this point and time, the director was coming into his own and, as some critics have said, was “outgrowing his influences.” In many respects, Stray Dog is sort of a picture of transition for Kurosawa. It showcases some of the storytelling elements that he would use in his later epics while underscoring his ability to create impeccable tension.
Toshirō Mifune stars as young Tokyo cop Murakami and he’s had his gun stolen on a crowded bus. The humiliation of losing his gun is the first of several afflictions, including the ever-present heat, that will grip Murakami. He must recover his weapon, which means he must go undercover to the boiling Tokyo streets. Things get tenser when the gun is used in a murder. Wracked with guilt, Murakami teams up with detective Sato (Takashi Shimura) to locate the weapon and solve the crime.
The relationship between Murakami and Sato deepens as the search for the criminal and the weapon deepens into the world of thieves and chorus girls. At one point, Murakami poses as a war veteran in order to plunge into the underworld, but due to the fact that he is, in fact, a veteran, the disguise wears on him more than it proves its efficacy. Kurosawa’s picture proceeds to take us lower into the streets and the lives of those who live in them, showing us a world that not only contains the criminal Murakami and Sato seeks but so many more instances of crime and suffering.
Stray Dog is largely about the atmosphere created by the streets and by the heat that invades every single crevice of Tokyo. Kurosawa captures some truly compelling sequences here, engaging us in the excess and the mania of the underworld. He often hints at other stories, at side alleys, and shows us a world where one story is never enough and one character is never what he or she seems initially. There is kindness, too, even in the most unlikely of places and we feel more than comfortable that Sato and Murakami are our guides.
It’s easy to discard Stray Dog as a sort of homage to American film noir, but it turns out that mimicking noir was never quite Kurosawa’s goal. While American noir was usually about violence solving a particular problem or delivering on a particular aim, Kurosawa’s motion picture doesn’t particularly solve, well, anything. The gun is just one in a sea of many, the murder is just one in a sea of many, and the characters are endless.
Instead, what Kurosawa grants us is ongoing. It is inconclusive; there is no happy ending. As a director forging ahead set to make a name for himself among the legends, Kurosawa’s charm here is in that he knows just how to conduct the film’s rhythm. At times Hitchcockian but mostly delivering his own charm and pace, Kurosawa grants us an early masterpiece with Stray Dog. It is a film that lingers long after the credits roll and it is a film that smoulders on the screen from the Tokyo heat.
