SUBJECTS

Criminal investigation -- Japan -- Tokyo -- Drama, Police -- Japan -- Drama

Stray Dog

(Nora inu)

featuring

Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Isao Kimura, Keiko Awaji,

On a crowded bus in teeming Tokyo, rookie policeman Murakami has his gun swiped. Fearful of losing his job—a cop without a job is a modern-day ronin—he embarks on a desperate search for the pickpocket. Murakami becomes a lone pilgrim in an underworld seething in the heat of summer and the crush of postwar shortages, rendered divinely hellish by Kurosawa’s odd-angled lensing and staccato editing. The policeman’s anxiety is heightened as reports come in of murders attributed to the stolen pistol; a simple theft becomes a case of murder-by-doppelgänger. Kurosawa acknowledged his debt to Georges Simenon, whose graying continental op Maigret is not resigned to the fact that the bad sleep well. But Stray Dog is typical of Kurosawa’s uncanny ability to mold genre to his own concerns. More than a hardboiled thriller, Stray Dog is a Dostoyevskian saga of guilt, and expiation, by association.

Judy Bloch
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Akira Kurosawa
  • Ryuzo Kikushima
Cinematographer
  • Asakazu Nakai
Language
  • Japanese
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
  • 122 mins
Source
  • Janus Films
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View Stray Dog documents  

Stray dog (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, 2005

Kurosawa & Mifune (program note), Film Forum (New York), 2002

Kurosawa and Mifune (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, James Quandt, 2002

Akira Kurosawa (article), American Film, Gerald Peary, 1989

The films of Akira Kurosawa (press release), Pacific Film Archive, 1974

Nora inu (review), Variety, Gene Moskowitz, 1959

Kurosawa on Kurosawa (article), Sight and Sound, Akira Kurosawa

The films of Akira Kurosawa (program), TLA Cinema

Kurosawa: a retrospective (program), Japan Society, David Owens

Stray dog (distributor materials)

Displaying 10 of 12 publicly available documents.


View all Stray Dog documentation on CineFiles.