Stray Dog

Year: 1949

Grade: B+

Country: Japan

Director: Kurosawa

Review

mifune plays a cop whose gun is stolen and subsequently used in several crimes. mifune is disgraced and searches desperately for the gun throughout the city. i think you have to watch any kurosawa film at least twice before you cast final judgment on it. that said here’s my first opinion…i liked it, but i didn’t love it. it’s the earliest (1949) kurosawa film i’ve seen so far and it seems to me that he didn’t really discover his vision until a year later with rashomon. it’s not that the film isn’t well done or doesn’t bear his signature, it’s just that things didn’t all come together technically and artistically until rashomon; so far as i’ve seen. there are shades of the humanity that he exhibits in the end of rashomon or in all of ikiru, but it isn’t as crystallized or focused in this film. toshiro mifune is brilliant as always. i love this guy. he may be my favorite actor of all-time. enough said there. actually, one more thing, mifune looks really good in this film – perhaps because he’s younger and clean shaven. good looking guy. back to the film…kurosawa tells a story as well as any other director i’ve ever seen. he knows how to keep you intrigued and involved in the story, the characters and the themes. it’s the kind of thing that is so easily over-looked because part of good story telling is that you don’t notice the elements of the storytelling. he uses voice-over in the beginning, but that’s the only time i really noticed i was being told a story. as an aside – both kurosawa and kubrick (my two favorites) are big fans of the voice-over. some tend to think using voice-over is lazy, but i have no problem with it. some of the other strong points of the film include kurosawa’s ability to draw the viewer into the shoes of mifune’s character. part of this is the amazing acting of mifune, but a lot of it is also a credit to kurosawa’s storytelling. i don’t know how to demonstrate that, but i think it’s true. the film dabbles in the noir genre, but isn’t strictly a film noir. there is a sense of fatalism that hangs over the film – the descent of mifune’s character into the underground, the sad state of social affairs, the sense that even if mifune hadn’t had his gun stolen the crimes in which is gun are later used would have been committed anyway. the more i think about the film, the more i realize how layered it is and how valuable a film it is. i wish i had liked it more because for me it’s more important to have my heart in a film than it is to have my mind in a film. my favorite films are always the films i experience on a visceral/emotional level first and an intellectual level second.