The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“One of the greatest detective films ever made.”

Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

Kurosawa Akira’s sizzling noir thriller offers an arrestingly atmospheric (and hellish) portrait of postwar Tokyo. Mifune Toshiro (in his third collaboration with Kurosawa) plays rookie cop Murakami, awkward in his new white suit, whose pistol is stolen on a crowded bus. Dishonoured and fearful of losing his job, he tracks the pickpocket through the menacing streets of Tokyo in the midst of a sweltering summer heat wave. As his obsessive pursuit drags on, disturbing parallels link the officer and his criminal prey. Stray Dog was adapted with screenwriter Kikushima Ryuzo (High and Low) from Kurosawa’s own unpublished detective novel; the director has said of both novel and film, ​“I am very fond of Georges Simenon, and I wanted to do something in his manner.” Jules Dassin’s summer-nights noir The Naked City was also a recognized influence. Kurosawa regular Shimura Takashi co-stars.

In Japanese with English subtitles

“Mifune is magnetic … but the real star of Kurosawa’s amazing 1949 crime melodrama is the city itself, in all its heat and squalor.”

Michael Sragow, The New Yorker