Walking Kurosawa's Road: Stray Dog

The inability to write about the films of Akira Kurosawa to my satisfaction led me to to take a different path: start at the beginning, take each film in sequence, one after the other, and watch the progression of the man from film-maker to Master. I'm hoping I can write more intelligently and more knowledgeably about his work by, step by step, Walking Kurosawa's Road.

Stray Dog (aka "Nora inu," aka 野良犬, Akira Kurosawa, 1949) Detective Murakami (Toshirô Mifune) has just started with the Homicide division when, after some target practice he loses his service pistol, a Colt, fully loaded, when he's pick-pocketed on a trolley. Maybe he should have had a holster for it, rather than kept it in his jacket pocket. But, it's hot and he was up all night on a stake-out, and he's a rookie.

Plus, it's tough to be at your best in all the heat, which is blasting the city. That probably had something to do with why he couldn't catch the thief when he noticed the pistol was gone, moments after it was lifted. He reports the weapon stolen, and, shamed, he starts his own investigation, going undercover for days to try and track it down—a bravura eight-minute sequence done without dialog. While he goes about the underbelly of Tokyo in his quest, the urgency for results starts to weigh on him even more. The division's forensics department matches a bullet from his gun with an armed robbery, his first break in the case but he takes no joy in it. The loss is still Murakami's responsibility and he worries that his gun will be used in worse crimes.

Murakami's undercover work pays off when he's able to follow a line to a dance-hall floozy who's a black marketer who trades guns for ration cards. He takes her in for questioning, but he makes a lot of what one would call "rookie mistakes" in his anxiousness to get a line on his gun. His superiors suggest he paired up with a more seasoned detective, Satō (Takashi Shimura), who does his own questioning of the girl—she's a bit vague on details like names and such, but she gives just enough information that the two detectives are able to track her supplier to a baseball stadium, where he's arrested and a name obtained from a ration card.

They've got a name—Yusa—but, not the man. They're able to find out that he's a war veteran who's returned to civilian life, but couldn't make a go of it and has turned to petty theft. For Murakami, this motivation only reflects that the two men have similar backgrounds, and, were it not for his own better angels, he might have ended up just as Yusa. Interviews and research get them closer to him, but he still remains illusive. The culprit's sister has lost track of him. But, she mentions a girl-friend and Satō and Murakami go to the night-club where she, Harumi Namaki (Keiko Awaji), dances. 

She wants nothing to do with the coppers, and she's evasive in her answers, even when Satō presses her with what he knows about them. The thief comes to see her dance every day—there has to be something between them. Satō isn't afraid to call her a liar and presses the question. The girl breaks down in hysterics. It's hot, everyone's tired, and the two decide to interview her again the next day, away from her work. 

Mifune does a distinctive John-Ford-Western stance before the clouds break.

But, the gun has been used again—this time in a house robbery resulting in murder. For Murakami, time is now of the essence and he'll do anything to get the gun back. There are only a few bullets left, and any of them can take a life. How much worse will it get before he can find his gun and the man wielding it? His worst fears will be realized, but first, he and Satō have to interview the girlfriend again. They choose a different approach.

The two detectives decide to confront Harumi at her mother's house. The mother already thinks Harumi is a spoiled child and turns on the guilts to try to get her daughter to spill what she knows to the detectives. Once the mother knows who they're looking for, she lets them know that Yusa has just left, leaving a box of matches. Satō, figuring that the mother will harangue the information out of her daughter eventually, takes the matches to follow up at the hotel they advertise, leaving Murakami with the two women. A thunderstorm starts to rumble outside ominously; the heat will break soon. Nature can only take so much pressure.

Under the accusations by her mother and Murakami, the girl starts to downplay the importance of the man, saying he's just a hanger-on at the club, love-sick, and that he's not important to her—except that he bought her a dress, one that she couldn't possibly afford herself. And why shouldn't she have something like that? It's a rotten world and she'll take all the gifts she can get out of it. "Yes, it's a rotten world," Murakami berates her. "But, it's worse to take it out on the world. If you feel that way about it, why don't you steal!" He notices that all she can do is look at the dress, reluctant to even touch it, so he goads her into putting it on. While, thunder cracks and the skies light up with lightning, she twirls in the dress in ecstasy ("It's wonderful...like a dream") until her mother can't take anymore and tears the dress off her. The girl, shamed, finally breaks down, while outside, the rains start to beat down. 

Personal responsibilities and consequences. Stray Dog is full of them. Murakami's protagonist puts himself through hell, counting (and sweating) bullets while the rest of the world blithely looks away or makes excuses. One would think he was too close to the situation, too emotionally invested, to be the lead investigator—and partnering him with Satō takes the edge off—but, his sense of guilt can only be dealt with if he can find the guilt party, and so he won't be dissuaded. If Mifune's performance doesn't persuade you of his troubled psyche, Kurosawa surrounds him with oppressive weather to put on the heat and scorch the earth to highlight the emotions. During the girl's breakdown it gets to be a shade too emblematic, but the release is effective, and one is grateful for the reprieve of the investigation's tension.

Kurosawa only liked it in retrospective, saying "all that technique and not one real thought in it." He'd been trying to make a movie in the style of the Maigret novels he loved as a child, with the gritty realism of film-noir and neo-realism emerging throughout world cinema, but could not reach his own high expectations. Still, if this is a failure, it's a damned good one, working on levels both obvious and subliminal. He changed his mind about the film, eventually, and I think it may have been a case of the director seeing all his own strings in play, and finding it all pretty obvious. It is the first Japanese police drama, and so he was plowing virgin fields here. 

But it's a brilliant film, and for a police procedural, it's pretty much the user's manual.

The "stray dog" is run to ground, captured, and lets out an animal howl. 

There are a lot of interesting things in this scene—the monster-like stances, the brief cut-away to an indifferent outside-world, the contrast of the brutal chase in the bucolic world.

Kurosawa's confrontation scene has influenced many a hard-boiled author and artist.