FANS of legendary director Akira Kurosawa are in for a treat at the end of this month as the BFI release his 1949 feature Stray Dog on Blu-ray and Prime Video.
Delivered in a sparkling 4K restoration and unveiled simultaneously with another of the director’s films, High And Low, on Blu-ray, this is a timely reminder of the acclaimed Seven Samurai film-maker’s impressive range of material and sheer depth of emotion in his prime.
A fascinating thriller that walks a stylish line between art house cool and streetwise B-movie, Stray Dog is set in the hot and dangerous back streets of an occupied Tokyo gripped by an overpowering heatwave.
Never obvious or predictable, Stray Dog is an intriguing blend of film noir traditions and straight ahead police action drama that follows the exploits of rookie detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), who finds himself on a very steep learning curve when he has his pistol lifted from his jacket pocket on a crowded trolly bus.
His desperate attempts to get his weapon back lead him deep into the dark backstreets of the capital’s thriving underworld. He swiftly realises his gun has already been picked up by a young headstrong gangster, and it is soon identified as having been used in a shooting.
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Overcome with remorse at what has happened, the young cop turns to his experienced senior officer, Sato (Takashi Shimura) for guidance and help to find the killer before he can strike again.
Stray Dog is a superior thriller on every front. For a start, it looks unfeasibly cool. A super stylish Japanese spin on the American Noir tradition, it takes us deep into post-war Japan for an unforgettable spin around the seedy backstreets where hungry, homeless demobbed soldiers hustle for a living amidst the steaming Tokyo streets.
Stray Dog is a superior thriller on every front. For a start, it looks unfeasibly cool
Murakami’s quest for his stolen Colt automatic brings us up close and personal with a world we rarely get to see, and Kurosawa beautifully captures that jazzy, illicit world of Tokyo with its sweltering heat and endless shadows.
It’s a thrill to see the young Mifune work with Kurosawa here, several years before Seven Samurai and even longer before their final collaboration Red Beard: he’s superb as the green homicide detective who’s thrown so mercilessly into the city’s seedy underworld.
Kurosawa, clearly channelling the crime novels of French author Georges Simenon, keeps the action lean and mean, and packs enough colourful characters into each sequence to keep interest levels high throughout.
This is film number nine in Kurosawa’s remarkable career and it might just be his first fully-fledged masterpiece.
A visually stunning journey into Tokyo’s mean streets during a truly all-consuming heatwave, it’s a breathless thriller with superb central performances from both Mifune and Shimura.
With its beautiful high definition transfer and extras including a freshly recorded audio commentary from film-maker Kenta McGrath and a brace of revealing mini-documentaries on Kurosawa’s craft, this new issue is the perfect way to enjoy Stray Dog in all its stylish glory.
