That was an excellent one.

Overrated

A Disappointing Continuation

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Kurosawa is one of my pet dislikes - the samurai stuff leaves me cold, the social dramas seem off the mark, and the crime capers just dreary. Part of the problem is that the man is humourless - I don't think I've seen a funny Kurosawa film, or even a funny moment. Still, here at last is something endurable. I had to overlook quite a lot in order to get to like this film but it was worth shifting aside the garbage to appreciate the gems.Again, there is no humour here, only a silly story about a rookie cop who has his gun stolen, resulting in a hunt for the lost article whose weary obsessiveness is as horribly monomaniacal as Bicycle Thieves. The cop, Toshiro Mifune (the big guy from the Seven Samurai), has a face like a young Gregory Peck but a personality so melodramatically emotional that we wonder if he should be resting in some kind of institution. The senior cop is - oh Christ - it's Takashi Shimura, the old git from Ikiru. About half an hour in, I'm seriously thinking of giving up. They've gone looking, on a hunch, for a guy in a baseball stadium - they find him among 50,000 people. I'm thinking: I'd much rather watch a version where they don't find him.None of this bodes well, but then Kurosawa - as if he really believes in this stuff - starts to crank out some pretty impressive scenes. We notice we are constantly peering through things and between things, through window frames into hovels, through smudgy glass doors, rainy windows, gauze curtains skeined with flowers, billows of smoke - all done in the ravishing von Sternberg manner.We note that, instead of choreography, he places people strategically within a frame, drawing diametric patterns with faces scattered within a room, and lets the compositions -always elegant and effective - relate the meaning. In particular, there are portraits of two women from the sleazy underworld that stand out - he really lavishes attention on them and it does the film the world of good because the cops have long become tiresome.The weather is close and the tension is building (way too much mopping of the brow from Shimura) - an old trick to build atmosphere, but it does provide the opportunity for several climactic scenes that run concurrently as the storm breaks.The story is worthless, but watch it for the technique.

During a sweltering summer, a rookie homicide detective tries to track down his stolen Colt pistol. The film is considered a precursor to the contemporary police procedural and buddy cop film genres.Kurosawa mentioned in several interviews that his script was inspired by Jules Dassin's "The Naked City" and the works of Georges Simenon. Kurosawa wrote the script with Ryūzō Kikushima, a writer who had never written a script before. Indeed, it would be hard to deny the influence that film noir had on this film, as it is essentially that: film noir set in a post-war Tokyo.I have to wonder what influence this film had , if any, on the Nikkatsu studio. They made many great gangster films in the 1950s and 1960s, and while there is a distinction between "film noir" and "gangster", there is enough overlap that surely "Stray Dog" must have been something that was in the back of their minds.

Akira Kurosawa co-wrote and directed his black & white detective-noir "Stray Dog" in 1949 - one year before the international break-out success of "Rashomon" (1950). In post-World War II Tokyo, Japan is still in the midst of recovering from its defeat in that devastating conflict. (While the country is obviously in shambles, incredibly enough, we never really see any of that, but still, its psychological impact is felt everywhere you look. But then again, this film is not about Japan's post-war-era of reconstruction.) During a sweltering summer heatwave, a pistol belonging to young Detective Murakami (a young Toshiro Mifune, one of Kurosawa's cinematic regulars) is stolen by a pickpocket while riding on a crowded city bus one day. The weapon changes many hands over the next few days, eventually winding up in the hands of a disgruntled World War II vet, later identified as a young man named Yusa (Isao Kimura). Murakami, also a war veteran, becomes obsessed with retrieving his gun, since it is used in a series of escalating, violent incidents around the city. During this time, he is also partnered up with an older, more experienced homicide detective, Sato (Takashi Shimura, another Kurosawa regular, most famous for "Ikiru" and "Seven Samurai," perhaps), to nab Yusa, the so-called "stray dog" of the title. "Stray Dog" is yet another classic from Akira Kurosawa. The film is nicely and beautifully shot; Kurosawa was a favorite of using the natural weather conditions to symbolize things happening on-screen, and here he uses the heat to great effect. Like how Spike Lee would do on "Do the Right Thing" 40 years later in 1989, we can feel the heat and how the tension, and Murakami's increasing anxiety and desperation, at solving his case before more people are hurt, affect him on a deeply personal and psychological level. Rain, which you would think would cool things down a bit, here, represents yet another escalation in things to come later on in the film. Perhaps one thing that "Stray Dog" illustrates best is that Murakami, in a way, is just like Yusa. As someone else also pointed out, both fell on hard times after their war service and were angry and frustrated at their circumstances, but Murakami picked himself up afterward. Also as someone pointed out, that means that, sometimes, the only thing that separates the two men from each other is the notion of choice - since Murakami explains that he could just as easily have become just like Yusa at some point.This movie is not to be missed if you're a true fan of the cinematic master craftsman, Akira Kurosawa.10/10

Boy oh boy, I'm a bit ashamed for this but nevertheless I have to point out that when I watched the Criterion DVD of STRAY DOG last Saturday night it was just my second encounter with the work of one of the, so called, true masters. With that said, I have to start saying that STRAY DOG begins in a way I would not have expected from a Kurosawa film: with a voice-over godlike narration. It sort of make you think that this Kurosawa film will be like a bit more "normal", I mean like a straight detective picture from the 40s. It can be seen as that but you would have to add the classic "but it is much more than just a straight detective picture". I found three scenes that are sort of the key to that. Obviously the first one is when our main character, Toshiro Mifune's Murakami (a rookie homicide detective), enters to the sort of ghetto town. Here the plot is simple: rookie detective suffered the attack of a pickpocket, who stole his gun. Half pay for some time and lost pride are some of the things that this brings. Indeed a terrible thing for Murakami. So he is there seeking for his gun in the most traditional detective way. And when the traces lead him to that sort of ghetto town you get the most unexpected. I call it patience. We witness Kurosawa's patience as he basically filmed like 10 minutes of Murakami seeing the horrors of that place. You need to be a patient viewer, is good stuff but certainly not for the fan of noisy stuff. So you know Kurosawa is into more, he's a filmmaker who announces at the beginning of his film, though his narrator, that this story is set during a heat wave, and who will remark you that all the time and even occupy like 3 minutes to simply show that (that scene when we see the dancers sweat). It's great how all of that makes truly unforgettable that STRAY DOG is a film set during a heat wave. I'm a huge fan of the TV show from Baltimore THE WIRE. And I recalled the show with this film. Good police work is shown here. The one that truly satisfy the viewer, or at least a viewer like myself. Plus we have great characters. Takashi Shimura, as Murakami's partner (the experimented detective Sato), is fantastic. Scenes like the one when both detectives leave the work for a while and go to Sato's place are as simple as fantastically satisfying. STRAY DOG success as it keeps you always interested. Can't wait to check out some more of these Kurosawa-Mifune-Shimura collaborations!