Stray Dog
is a 1949 Japanese crime drama noir film directed and co-written by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. It was Kurosawa's second film of 1949 produced by the Film Art Association and released by Shintoho. It is also considered a detective movie (among the earliest films in that genre) that explores the mood of Japan during its painful postwar recovery. The film is also considered a precursor to the contemporary police procedural and buddy cop film genres, based on its premise of pairing two cops with different personalities and motivations together on a difficult case.
Plot
The film takes place during a heatwave in the middle of summer in post-war Tokyo. Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), a newly-promoted homicide detective in the Tokyo police, has his Colt pistol stolen while riding on a crowded trolley. He chases the pickpocket, but loses him. A remorseful Murakami reports the theft to his superior, Nakajima, at police headquarters. After Nakajima encourages him to conduct an investigation into the theft, the inexperienced Murakami gets a lead from one of the ladies who traveled in the trolley and goes undercover in the city's backstreets for days, trying to infiltrate the illicit arms market. He eventually locates a dealer who agrees to sell him a stolen gun, but when Murakami arrests the dealer's girlfriend at the exchange, he is distraught to find that she doesn't know anything about his missing gun.
More details
author | Akira Kurosawa |
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contentLocation | Tokyo |
director | Akira Kurosawa |
editor | Akira Kurosawa |
genre | crime drama thriller |
keywords | arms dealing arms market baseball baseball game change of heart colt colt model 1908 vest pocket forensic firearm examination forensic firearms expert gun dealer heatwave homicide detective hotel owner morning pickpocket police headquarter rid toshiro mifune train station trolley trolleybus undercover undercover police war veteran white suit wife and child wound |
musicBy | Fumio Hayasaka |
producer | Sōjirō Motoki |
productionCompany | Film Art Association Shintoho |
publisher | Toho |
recordedAt | Japan |
theme | buddy cop film noir noir police procedural yakuza |