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Akira Kurosawa’s scalding 1949 cop thriller Stray Dog (★★★★★), with its extended closeup shot of a mad dog snarling into the camera over the opening credits, is about a stolen gun; as with De Sica’s stolen bicycle the year before, the resulting search leads us on a tour of the city, scene by scene into a world of poverty, cynicism and violence.
It is a gripping, drum-tight picture, a panoramic drama of crime revealed over one sweltering summer in postwar Tokyo which culminates in an ominous monsoon downpour and it stars two alpha-dogs of Japanese cinema, both stalwarts of Kurosawa. Takashi Shimura is veteran police officer Detective Sato, tolerant, good-humoured, realistic about the prospects for containing, if not eradicating crime, and Toshiro Mifune is his partner, rookie cop Murakami, part of the new, thoughtful postwar generation concerned with upbringing and psychology. Murakami teaches the older man the unfamiliar term “après-guerre” to describe his new attitudes, although he has to be reminded that the police is different from the army, less regimented and more about initiative. Mifune is still a young man of 29 in this film, although he clearly shows that amazing natural severity and martial nobility.
Murakami suffers the unthinkable humiliation and professional castration of having his handgun stolen (a real-life situation from the Tokyo police case files researched by Kurosawa and his co-writer Ryuzo Kikushima); what’s more, he loses the gun to a wily female pickpocket (Teruko Kishi), who sells it on to a black-market firearms trader in the city’s underbelly, who in turn “rents” it to a petty hoodlum, embittered by getting his kitbag stolen after being demobbed. Murakami ruefully remembers the same thing happening to him after the war and considers how easily he himself could have turned to crime. This kid is now avid for cash to impress his chorus-line girlfriend Harumi (Keiko Awaji) and his incompetent crimes escalate in seriousness and violence. Murakami is desperate, in a race against time to track down the weapon and the culprit – the “stray dog” – while redeeming his own honour and preventing any more bloodshed for which he feels himself responsible.
There are unforgettable sequences: the ballistics department microscope matching up bullet fragments, the Hitchcockian moment in which the gun dealer is tracked down at a baseball match, a nightclub’s backstage changing room where the young dancers collapse into a sweaty, near-comatose heap in the unbearable heat – and the man whose wife has been murdered, ripping up her ripened tomato plants in a frenzy of rage and despair. And all the time Murakami is in mental turmoil, a state of mind which the old-hand Sato counsels him against. Murakami feels guilty, but Sato keeps telling him that if it wasn’t his gun, it would be someone else’s; of course, you must take pains to ensure your gun isn’t stolen, but it makes no great overall difference to the quantum of crime which they must unendingly keep under control. Murakami can’t or won’t absorb that lesson, and his ordeal is the pulse that drives the story onward.
Also reissued, to coincide with a retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, is Kurosawa’s 1963 movie High and Low (★★★★★). This epic noir procedural, in stark monochrome enlivened with a mischievous touch of colourised pink at one moment, is adapted from Ed McBain’s hardboiled US thriller King’s Ransom, and transplanted from the 87th police precinct of McBain’s fictional city Isola (based on New York) to Yokohama in modern Japan, where the economy is starting to boom with American-style consumer goods, widening the gap between the haves and have-nots.
Kurosawa’s shrewd use of American source material comes three years after John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven, based on his own classic Seven Samurai; Kurosawa here gives us two Japanese boys playing at cowboys, with six-shooters and Winchesters, the father of one approving of their winner-takes-all violent gunplay. It’s a cynical story from the big city that might have interested Billy Wilder.
Mifune, with his usual fierce leonine handsomeness, plays Gondo, an executive with a shoe company who takes pride in the firm’s well-crafted product and resents his colleagues’ plans to increase profit margins with shoddier goods. Gondo has a secret scheme to impose his own vision by taking a controlling interest in the (publicly owned) company, rashly mortgaging the family home to buy up a majority shareholding – to the stricken horror of his loyal wife Reiko (Kyoko Kagawa, the youngest daughter from Ozu’s Tokyo Story) whose own marriage dowry is the source of their financial stability.
But just as he is about to dispatch his duplicitous underling Kawanishi (Tatsuya Mihashi) with a cheque to complete this stunning boardroom coup, Gondo hears that a kidnapper has made a chaotic attempt to kidnap his adored son – but by accident instead took the son of Gondo’s heartbreakingly loyal and submissive chauffeur Aoki (Yutaka Sada). The culprit is demanding a king’s ransom or the boy dies. Can Gondo relinquish his corporate dreams and face ruin to save the son of a servant?
The movie is fascinatingly flavoured from the very outset by the knowledge that we know Gondo’s defiant instinct is not to do it; he angrily proclaims his refusal in front of his wife, the police and the agonised chauffeur himself. However, reluctant agreement is forced on him by his enemies’ power-play, instigated by the slippery Kawanishi who also claims that refusing to help would blacken Gondo’s reputation – a reasonably correct assumption, in fact, as Gondo is to become a press hero for doing the opposite.
Kurosawa coolly takes the story wherever it needs to go, giving us enough storytelling material to fill a complete streaming-TV series as ambitious as The Wire, with corporate politics, cop stoicism, resentment boiling from the city’s poor and chortlingly cynical journalists who can be manipulated. After fully 55 minutes in Gondo’s luxury home at the beginning, tensely discussing matters with the police, we then go to a fraught action sequence on a commuter train for the cash handover, then to the sweaty world of the police station house for the detective work (featuring Kurosawa’s repertory veteran Takashi Shimura). Here Aoki tries to reclaim some of his own shattered manhood and self-respect by doing some sleuthing with his boy. In the third act, Gondo himself is almost entirely forgotten until his queasy final encounter with the kidnapper.
The movie gives us an intense, forensic scrutiny of police surveillance footage of the kidnapper’s accomplices, a weird premonition of Antonioni’s Blow-Up or the Zapruder film. Kurosawa’s film is also one of the first to give us the “kidnap” trope that is to dominate film and TV from then on: the taunting phone conversation with the criminal terminating just before the call can be traced, the sound of specific things in the conversation’s background which allow sharp cops to figure out where the man must be making the call.
Poor Gondo. He was the ultimate capitalist: a risk-taker, a deal-maker, a man who had brilliantly sized up the situation and had the courage to seize his chance, but always with a high and moral aim in view. He wanted to make decent shoes for the people. But it ends in calamity, and it isn’t at all clear if he thinks his compromised moral heroism and sacrifice has been worth it. An amazing, sustained piece of film-making bravura from Kurosawa.
