• 野良犬 (Stray Dog)

11/13/20 (Fri), Tokyo

Two veterans of the recently ended war, we learn, had their backpacks stolen when they were younger. One channeled his anger into a desire to help the world and has become a policeman. The other let his anger destroy him and has become a criminal. That thin line between “stray dog” and “mad dog” is the film’s theme in a nutshell.

Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949) is nominally a detective story, a stylish film noir, but it digs much deeper. The setting is then-contemporary Japan, the immediate postwar era, during a swelteringly humid summer. A young policemen named Murakami (a fantastic Mifune Toshiro) is humiliated to learn that his gun has been stolen while on a bus. He then becomes obsessed with finding the weapon, particularly when he learns that it has been used in a shooting. He teams up with veteran Sato (Shimura Takashi, also excellent), who methodically follows numerous leads – the female pickpocket, a gun runner, the thief’s sister, his dancer girlfriend – to narrow the trail. Sato, having seen it all before, warns Murakami not to become emotionally invested in his cases, but Murakami remains consumed by guilt as the weapon is used in other shootings, including murder. The gun eventually comes back to haunt him in a cruelly ironic way.

As he pursues the case, the desperate lives of many that Murakami encounters become an indictment of their own. In one moving scene, the dancer pulls out a stylish dress that the thief bought for her with stolen money, observing tearfully that stealing is the only way she can ever attain such goods. The film is a subtle criticism of a society that lets many fall through the cracks and then punishes them for it. Japan has just been utterly defeated in a devastating war that has overturned all previous ideals and assumptions, and a new society is still taking shape. The thief has left a note speculating that an alley cat that has followed him in the rain will just suffer, so “better to kill it once and for all”, a commentary of its own. As everyone grapples for an unknown future, Murakami could have easily become the thief (and vice versa) in different circumstances, and the film suggests that we are all in this together. That problem was solved in a way in subsequent years as Japan’s middle class grew exponentially, but the theme remains valid.

Kurosawa treats all characters with respect; no white-hat black-hat treatment here. The characters become lost in the bustling city: spectators at a baseball game, nightclub dancers and people at a bus station are dressed so similarly as to be interchangeable; Murakami and the thief are themselves indistinguishable from one another when they fight at the end. Yet the people we meet are real and sympathetic. It’s hard to distinguish the good from the bad. The trajectory of the gun recalled Japan’s own situation during the war, as the guns it used to foment conflict rebounded on it in a horrifying way.

At the same time, Murakami’s pity for the criminals he is supposed to be hunting contrasts with Sato’s more clinical approach to his job. Sato is not unsympathetic with the younger man’s feelings, but his actions suggest a belief, honed from years of seeing the same crimes repeated, that we cannot cure society, only ourselves; society can only function if each person takes responsibility for his/her own actions. The villains deserve no greater compassion than their victims. He is confident that Murakami will come around to that stance once he’s been in the job long enough. The pairing of the two thus represents not simply a personality clash but a profoundly different view of society.

For all that, the story was straightforward and extremely well written (by Kurosawa along with Kikushima Ryuzo), with finely observed characterizations. The photography and lighting and postwar setting were highly atmospheric; the Tokyo heat was practically a character on its own. The acting was terrific all around other than the overacted comic character (here, a gigolo), never Kurosawa’s strong suit. Mifune was wonderfully intense as the brooding policeman, and Shimura was a perfect foil. Both worked again with Kurosawa numerous times – just a year later, for starters, in Rashomon, the film that put Kurosawa and Japanese film on the world map – but their teamwork here was as good as it gets. A thoughtful examination of society as well as great entertainment.