Stray Dog - 1949
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa & Ryūzō Kikushima
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Awaji, Noriko Sengoku & Noriko Honma
You get to a certain point in a movie sometimes, while watching it, when it dawns on you that it's something special. Something that stands apart. That happened to me while watching Akira Kurosawa's
Stray Dog. The scene I was watching involved an undercover detective, Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), pacing Tokyo's backstreets and slum areas. He's dressed himself in an old army conscript's uniform, and as advised to (by a woman he's wrung information from) he's putting on the look of a desperate man. He's waiting for an underworld foot soldier to approach him with an offer. In the meantime Murakami has to pace, look agitated, enquire and generally hang out during a hot summer's day, and night, and day. He has to be patient, and have stamina. What's to love about this scene? The cinematography and direction (at times by 2nd unit director Ishirô Honda, whose feet and lower half depicting Murakami are actually his own, and not Toshiro Mifune's) are of course superb and wonderful - but what I was so in love with was the time Kurosawa invests in this portion of the film. He extends this montage sequence to the absolute limits and in doing so injects a little of what Murakami would be feeling. I thought that it was such an astute choice, and as such I was beginning to appreciate
Stray Dog quite a lot.
It all starts with a gun - a gun that will be central to the film's plot throughout it's entire length. A .25 caliber Colt automatic which is stolen from a young man new to the force - the same Detective Murakami who walks the streets of Tokyo as mentioned above. Every person that gun hurts from that moment forward, Murakami blames himself - despite the fact that the person who does the hurting would have simply got himself a
different gun, and still have shot those he ends up shooting. Still - you can understand his feeling. If it were yours, you'd feel the uncomfortable implication. Now this young cop has his own, special,
personal reason to find the person causing havoc with his gun - and the senior detective he joins is Chief Detective Satō, played by another of Kurosawa's regulars - Takashi Shimura. Shimura featured in 21 of Akira Kurosawa's films (more than Mifune), starting off by appearing in the famous director's first ever feature - 1943 film
Sanshiro Sugata. Mifune appeared in 16 Kurosawa films, starting with
Drunken Angel in 1948 (alongside Shimura.) The two actors appeared together in 53 films over the years, including 15 Akira Kurosawa films.
I watched
Stray Dog on a hot day, and as such felt the heat the characters were feeling - drenched in sweat at times and on edge. It's a police procedural that takes to location shooting in Tokyo just as much as Jules Dassin's
The Naked City took to New York - with the differences in style, culture and mode of living still not able to completely erase the comparative inspiration you can see. It's a film that luxuriates in it's scenes, giving characters plenty of time to reveal themselves. Setting, climate and character fuse together with all three conspicuously making their presences felt through the length of these scenes - not stretched inordinately, but certainly not hurried. The plot has intricacies, but is straightforward enough that I needn't really reveal anything more about it for the sakes of a review. Information and leads are gleaned and used - and it leads to another absolute stand-out section of the film which takes place at a packed baseball game in a large stadium (Korakuen Stadium). I recognized it immediately from other films - but all of them were made after
Stray Dog. Tracking one criminal amongst maybe 35-40 thousand people is the ultimate challenge, but it's as cinematic as hell and calls for both cunning and fevered action once the chase is on.
So, I find myself admiring
Stray Dog as a particularly brilliant film, but I feel a little bit as if words are wasted in trying to describe it's greatness. You just have to see it for yourself. It takes it's time in involving us with ordinary police work. Shadowing someone. Chasing someone. Developing leads. Watching and observing. Searching. Waiting. Kurosawa always knows exactly where to place the camera in the real world, and it often feels like we're the detectives - keeping watch, being patient and taking note of everything. Mifune and Shimura look so young - they haven't quite evolved into the duo I know them as, but that makes it all the more easy to see them as their characters and not themselves. Sometimes watching ultra-famous actors takes you away from the character they're portraying a little bit. The filmmaker provided as much reality as he could to present to his audience - people and situations that feel genuine, and he sent his co-writer, Ryūzō Kikushima, to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to find and bring him a case he could base his movie on. There's not too much artifice here, and although you can feel the smoothness of the production, there has obviously been a lot of hard work put into it.
This film features a great performance from Shimura as the old, seasoned detective and a great score from Fumio Hayasaka - one that borrows particularly heavily from Hollywood Film Noir, but injects subtle Japanese influences into it. It also features top-rate cinematography from Asakazu Nakai, who would stick with Kurosawa right up to his masterpiece,
Ran, which came out nearly 4 decades after this. The art direction (from another Kurosawa regular, Takashi Matsuyama) is also worthy of mention. All four of these factors - Shimura's performance, the score, cinematography and art direction made
Stray Dog a stand-out by winning 4 awards at the prestigious Mainichi Film Concours. Kurosawa couldn't repeat his 1948 feat of being awarded best film (for
Drunken Angel), but
Stray Dog still represents a filmmaker already creating films of an everlasting standard - and it's hard to believe that he'd get even better as time went on, becoming one of the all-time greats on the international scene. I'm very happy to have become acquainted with it, and despite knowing it would be great because of who made it, the film still exceeded my expectations. There's nothing better than watching Shimura and Mifune do their stuff as directed by the master himself, Kurosawa.
Rating :
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as long as you're going to watch it soon, that's cool. BTW what is Fawesome? I've never heard of it. And do you still need a link I might be able to find one if you do, let me know.
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