Nora inu (Stray Dog, 1949)

Kurosawa Akira

Japan

122 min, B&W, Japanese (English subtitles)

As the war-ravaged 1949 Tokyo undergoes an oppressive heat wave, detective Murakami's (Mifune Toshiro) gun is stolen on a crowded bus. When his boss refuses to relieve him of duty but instead suggests that he start looking for the Colt, Murakami goes into action. His initial inquiries lead him to the capture of a girl who is the front of an entire gun rental operation. Joining the older and far more experienced Sato (Shimura Takashi), Murakami hunts the criminal who has rented his gun and battles with his tormented conscience as victims begin to turn up, shot with bullets from his Colt.

Under the guise of making a straight detective story, Kurosawa serves another dose of his often heavy-handed social critique. The plot is not so much a whodunit as it is about the meaning of evil, its genesis, and where responsibility for it should be assined. Sato is unapologetic for the criminals, calling them mad dogs, and confessing that even though he was sympathetic to their dire cicumstances that had forced them to turn bad, he no longer accepts this excuse but has transfered his feelings to their numerous innocent victims. Murakami is more ambivalent for "dirt begets evil" and feels that both his irresponsibility in losing the gun and the misfortune of the war-displaced generation combine to make mad dogs out of strays.

Murakami was himself a stray dog when after the war his knapsack was stolen (a thing he has in common with the killer) but while some choose to use this as an excuse for turning to crime, Murakami recognizes it as the dangerous watershed in his life and chooses the become a policeman. Thus, Kurosawa manages to undermine the strongest point of the film which is that it is the environment that produces evil by correctly assigning personal responsbility for the choice to go bad. The environment is permissive but not causal. At the end of the film, Murakami looks out of the hospital window where the wounded Sato is recovering while the latter instructs him to look at what we can imagine is the labyrinthine mess of rooftops below. There, he says, many innocent people will be hurt by those who have chosen to give in to adversity, and as policeman, it is Murakami's duty to protect them.

Filmed in glorious black and white, the film shows signs of aging. There are many sequences that hamper the story and are mostly extraneous to its development. Take, for example, Murakami's stroll as the "down and out" veteran through Tokyo's amusement park. This uneventful sequence lasts for minutes where seconds would have been enough to establish the point Kurosawa wanted to make. Another annoying example is the baseball game. Even this talented director cannot succeed in making this dull sport exciting. Why he chose to film the play is unclear. If it was to contrast the first part while the detectives were looking for Honda with the second after they had found him, which judging by the sinister music in the latter was his intent, then it is not clear why there should have been a contrast at all.

The performances are excellent, but Mifune (as usual) excels. His impulsive detective threatens to burst out while at the same time trying to shelter the fragile sense that separates him from the criminal. Indeed, at the end when he manages to capture his elusive prey (as Sato has told him, "a mad dog sees only his prey," a reference to the killer which applies just as well to Murakami's single-minded pursuit), the two are exhausted and collapse in the tall grass, their white linen suits dirty with mud and undistinguishable. When the killer finally breaks down crying, Murakami looks on startled by the still existing humanity in what he thought was a mad dog.

Kurosawa being Kurosawa, there are several hauntingly beautiful images in the film. One that particularly stands out is the scene where the killer's girfriend Harumi (Awaji Keiko) puts on an expensive dress she knows her boyfriend has killed for and begins dancing in the room shouting "I am happy! I am happy" while the first flashes of lightning forebode the storm that is gatherig outside and the one that is gathering inside. Finally, her mother interrupts the insane display, rips off the dress and hurls it out the window. Harumi collapses to her mother's feet begging forgiveness as Murakami gazes in stunned silence.

The BFI DVD is average. There are far too many specks and the picture is a bit unstable. Even then, however, it is better than the tape version I have, so the DVD is the way to go. As with other BFI releases, the disc is light on extras, with some talent bios and the movie poster. Why can't they at least put an audio commentary is beyond me.

October 28, 2002