East and West

Toshiro Mifune and Keiko Awaji

Stray Dog (1949) is Akira Kurosawa’s tenth film and only his third with the charismatic young actor Toshiro Mifune (his seventh film role). It is one of the rewards of movies to be able to see a budding genius director so openly display his love of American directors: Ford, Welles, Huston, Walsh. Kurosawa takes the police procedural form and inventively expands it in various directions: a buddy picture, a psychological–existential drama, and an Expressionist morality play. The movie is bursting at the seams. It’s a Bildungsroman by a director who is finding a new language to express everything he can in a humanist spirit. Stray Dog has a purity of purpose. Kurosawa directed his first movie in 1943; by 1948, in Drunken Angel, and 1949, in Stray Dog, he was already the greatest master of pastiche and action technique in the world. You can feel the simultaneous forces of the East and the West, yet there is no unease with the material: the tableaus of the desperately hustling, naïve young cop (Mifune) in the ramshackle side streets of Tokyo are both triumphantly personal and universal. Takashi Shimura, a Kurosawa stalwart from Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), and The Seven Samurai (1954), plays the mentor detective. He was an old pro even by 1949. Kurosawa here is right on the cusp of surpassing his American idols. The following year, with Rashomon, those same American directors had the opportunity to see how they’d been topped by this Beethoven of the East.