Sep 15, 2009 4:39 PM

Back To Top

Akira Kurosawa, the late, great Japanese filmmaker, is best known for his period-piece films like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and his takes on Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear stories—Throne of Blood and Ran. But what some consider his first masterpiece, released a year before Rashomon put him on the international map in 1950, is the detective film Stray Dog. Only, as with all of Kurosawa's work, it's so much more.

First, the plot. Murakami, a rookie police detective and World War II veteran, is on a crowded bus in Tokyo on a sweltering summer day when he realizes his pistol has been stolen. Determined to track it down, he enlists the aid of a police pickpocket expert, who leads him to the woman who lifted the piece. But she, it turns out, handed it over to an anonymous black-marketeer. Her advice: Go undercover as someone desperately seeking an illegal firearm.

Kurosawa's black-and-white film is set just a few years after Japan's humiliating defeat, when war-ravaged Tokyo was teeming with poor people and petty criminals. What's seen on camera during the undercover sequence was shot, documentary-style, on the city's streets, driving home the point that post-war Japan was physically and psychologically scarred. It thus makes sense that Murakami (the excellent Toshiro Mifune) would do everything possible to reclaim the shred of dignity—and, to some degree, power—his pistol represents.

What he eventually discovers—thanks to a forensics team tracking the origin of each bullet—is that another war vet is now in possession of the gun and using it to commit robberies. Kurosawa, who died in 1998 at the age of 88, was, indeed, a master storyteller; but in Stray Dog, he also used the police-procedural format as a way to reveal what must have been difficult for Japanese audiences, in particular, to watch: a society trying to make sense of its devastating losses while struggling to survive.

Murakami learns that the thief, Yusa, is his age and, like the detective, had his backpack stolen while taking a train home from the front. He's also been living in a lean-to behind his parents' house and using the money he's stolen to buy gifts for his girlfriend, another struggling Tokyoite. The once-idealistic Murakami—aided by Sato, a seasoned detective offering a middle-aged perspective—comes to realize that life isn't all black and white.

In fact, the penultimate scene (spoiler alert), in which Murakami fights Yusa for possession of the weapon, is mostly gray. Out in a muddy field otherwise accented by flowers in bloom, the two men drop to the ground next to each other. Both are covered in mud, looking almost identical. But then Yusa—either releasing pent-up emotions or expressing relief, or both—lets out a scream.

It's an image, for me, that evokes both death and birth.

Comments (0) Post a Comment