The movie opens on an exausted dog on the street, suffering under the hot sun and endlessly panting. Yet as much as we like dirty mutts, its got the look of desperation in its eyes, and not of the good kind. Michael Vick probably owned him at one point.
This is the allegory for what is to come in Akira Kurosawa's STRAY DOG, a very underrated film-noir that had the misfortune of being obscured by the greater later works of a master filmmaker this side of Stanley Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY.
Since this is film-noir, you have a tale about very desperate people trapped in a narrowing scheme set against the backdrop of an urban hell. STRAY DOG was produced in the great cinema era of the film-noir, except its a very fascinating and gripping Japanese take on the genre.
Like many film-noir tales go, the premise is rather simple. Toshiro Mifune is a rookie cop who gets his Colt pistol stolen by a pickpocket, and the hero spends the whole movie scouring the streets of Tokyo to retrieve his piece. But beyond the really good police procedural in STRAY DOG is Kurosawa's dramatic exploration of post-war Japan.
Endless streets are cluttered with rubble and bombed-out homes, with civilians trying to grind out a survival a few years after the conclusion of World War 2. Even a senior police officer is lucky to simply have the remains of what was his house be cleaned up of debris. The back alleys of this very crowded city are full of a several seedy characters willing to capitalize on the despair of so many people.
Yet the thematic punch that makes STRAY DOG a great movie is its humanity. The greenhorn constable hero searches day and night to retrieve the gun back, and he gets heavily depressed when his piece becomes involved in several horrendous crimes.
STRAY DOG is a guilt drama that one would expect from a Martin Scorsese or an Abel Ferrera, not out of the stereotypically solemn Japanese. Without any obvious religion, its a surprisingly Catholic picture.
A brilliant touch though by Kurosawa is when the hero is on the trail of the culprit, who actually remains faceless until a key moment in the climax. Until then, the only information we get of said criminal is intel squeezed out of interrogation and clues.
Witnesses and associates talk about this "stray dog," we imagine these scenes very lividly. A hack director would have actually shot them, but Kurosawa knew that he didn't need to. The audience will create the scenes for him.
Yet when the finale arrives, and Mifune confronts the crook, we realize that these men are of the same generation that went off to war, came back to a humiliating occupation, and either controlled their bitter anger or indulged within it. Mifune is practically facing off against a mirror image, an alternative reality of himself, minus the stupid evil goatee.
Yet as they lay exausted in the grass, a new generation of kids play off in the distance, an aeon that won't know of the demons that made these men suffer or prevail in spite of them.
