Part of Akira Kurosawa: A Retrospective
A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a hot, crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog whose desperation has led him to a life of crime. With each step, cop and criminal’s lives become more intertwined and the investigation becomes an examination of Murakami’s own dark side. Starring Toshiro Mifune as the rookie cop, and Takashi Shimura as the seasoned detective who keeps him on the right side of the law, STRAY DOG goes beyond a crime thriller, probing the squalid world of postwar Japan and the nature of the criminal mind.
“Kurosawa’s film has a richness — an abundant and almost unruly curiosity about the extremes of human behavior…. It’s obvious in the movie that at this point in Kurosawa’s career (just a year before his international breakthrough, RASHOMON) he was outgrowing his influences, and that, whether he knew it or not, he was destined to become more than a reliable genre craftsman…. STRAY DOG is, I think, Kurosawa’s first masterpiece. And that’s the excitement you feel when you watch the movie today: it’s the thrill of seeing a great filmmaker come of age.” —Terrence Rafferty, Criterion Collection
“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.” —Peter Bradshaw, Guardian (UK)