Stray Dog

Summer in Tokyo, unbearable heat. Murakami, a young detective, has his pistol stolen on a bus. When the gun is used in a robbery he holds himself responsible and goes after it. He spends days moving through the poorest parts of the city, the black market and the shanties. Sato, an experienced detective, is assigned to him. The subject is not crime but the detective and the killer coming from the same place. Both came back from the war, both lost everything; Murakami chose the police and the other took a different road. Sato refuses the comparison outright, and that is the film's argument. The form is semi-documentary: the long passage in which Murakami searches the black market runs almost without speech and was shot with a hidden camera in the real streets of post-war Tokyo. The heat is visible in every scene, with people sweating and fanning themselves constantly. Akira Kurosawa directs; this is one of his first entries into crime and among the early films to show post-war Japanese poverty directly. He said he wrote it under the influence of Georges Simenon's novels. Toshirō Mifune plays Murakami and Takashi Shimura plays Sato. Who it is for: viewers who like classical Japanese cinema and urban crime films. Who it is not for: anyone wanting pace; the film is long and its central search is deliberately slow.