Puppy Love

Stray Dog Directed by Akira Kurosawa Run time: 122 min.   Film Forum's Akira Kurosawa series (Jan. 6 through Feb. 4) begins the decade as more than a career retrospective; it’s a rescue effort for film culture. Kurosawa has gone from preeminent mastery as Japan’s best known filmmaker to near obscurity, overshadowed by passing vogues for artier directors like the great Mizoguchi and Ozu and the lesser, in fact minor, Naruse.That’s what makes Kurosawa’s 1949 police drama Stray Dog the perfect series opener; relatively unknown, it confirms why Kurosawa was, for so long, top dog. Its example should inspire the new decade.  

How Stray Dog’s crime genre plot is used to create a cultural epic, surveying post-WWII Japanese society through detailed observation of both broken standards and spiritual desperation, should rectify our new cynical-sentimentality. Its simple premise—Detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune) loses his pistol to a pickpocket and obsessively searches for it—occasions a more complicated look at the human network than most 21st century films. Kurosawa and his cinematographer Asakazu Nakai create trenchant metaphor upon metaphor about the universal struggle for moral responsibility. Each storytelling sequence, as Murakami interviews witnesses, tours post-war devastation, acquires a mentor, chases down the criminal Hondo (Reis aburo Yamamoto), features a great exercise in narrative versatility.

There’s the Kurosawa of movement, space and nature like David Lean but also the intimate, ethnic Kurosawa. His classical virtues—balanced form, recognizable humanity and aesthetic beauty— have mostly vanished from contemporary film. So Stray Dog’s grand realism feels new. Despite Kurosawa’s renown as a director of large-scale pageantry (Throne of Blood, Seven Samurai, Ran), his profound understanding of psychological motives and social complexity gives Stray Dog genuine moral substance. It should be seen by anyone who thinks Avatar is what movies were made for. For trendoids impressed by David Fincher’s true-crime slog Zodiac, Stray Dog should be required viewing. Kurosawa demonstrates how an expansive view of a single man’s dilemma vitally reflects his larger society.

The title (emblazoned across a tabloid credit sequence that Sam Fuller surely envied) comes from an axiom “A stray dog becomes a rabid dog,” admonishing an unstable public’s displacement of its citizenry. Murakami’s anxiety as a law officer stems from his veteran’s experience in the “apres-guerre” (after war) generation who has lost its bearings. His nemesis Yusa is branded an “après-nothing” to set mere delinquency apart from wartime’s true disillusionment. This importantly contests the mannered miasma in Zodiac that Fincherheads think distills the zeitgeist when it merely reflects shallow narcissism. Kurosawa’s social emphasis exposes the irrelevance of Fincher’s decadent style.

Against oversimplifications like TV crime shows and Fincher’s indifference to narrative realism (what an art magazine praised as “drift”), Stray Dog comes at the right time to remind us what defines genuine movie art, particularly Kurosawa’s.

Through his kaleidoscopic vision, Kurosawa ponders both the impossibility of controlling society and the moral obligation to try.This vigorous philosophy vision is embodied in the young Mifune’s handsome compassion, less conflicted than his scoundrel/samurai roles. Here, Mifune’s dynamism suggests an athlete’s perfectly beautiful performance of duty.

Kurosawa is so famous for spectacle it is enlightening to behold his political and emotional sensitivity. Stray Dog permits a major reassessment—reclaiming Kurosawa’s social view in the face of Mizoguchi and Ozu, and establishes his innovative lensing and editing before Oshima’s postmodernism.The reassessment reproves Sokurov’s inanities about postwar Japan in The Sun and Corneliu Porumboiu’s insipid social ideas in Police, adjective—films that lack the psychological and political depth to reconnect cultural unease to a spiritual solution. Kurosawa’s literarybased characterizations occupy a totally cinematic, sensuous environment. Preceding TV and shallow digital filmmaking, Kurosawa suggests an amalgam of Dickens, Balzac, plus Velasquez and Delacroix.

This richness is what previous generations first responded to in his films. Here is the source of Coppola’s deep, photographic interest in everything, still tied to basic human emotion; of the white-suited villain in DePalma’s The Untouchables; and the teeming, steaming city in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

Kurosawa’s concentration gives Stray Dog the abundance of several films; it coheres independently striking sequences like the mentor cop, always expecting rain (as in Rashomon, Seven Samurai), until the humidity gives way to a cathartic burst where a lovelorn witness, geisha girl Harumi, erupts in shame and frustration. In such a scene, Kurosawa’s enormous, almost physical compassion recalls silent cinema—a morality now lost to nihilistic detachment. A stakeout scene in a hotel lobby features Hitchcockian control yet expands with Renoir-like breadth. And a great cop/crook confrontation where both lie amidst mud and flowers while strange music invades their tension anticipates the epic stress of Seven Samurai yet is singularly, mysteriously poignant. Stray Dog could become a new generation’s favorite Kurosawa film—and their artistic salvation.