Akira Kurosawa’s scalding 1949 cop thriller Stray Canine (★★★★★), with its prolonged closeup shot of a mad canine snarling into the digicam over the opening credit, is a few stolen gun; as with De Sica’s stolen bicycle the yr earlier than, the ensuing search leads us on a tour of the town, scene by scene right into a world of poverty, cynicism and violence.
It’s a gripping, drum-tight image, a panoramic drama of crime revealed over one sweltering summer season in postwar Tokyo which culminates in an ominous monsoon downpour and it stars two alpha-dogs of Japanese cinema, each stalwarts of Kurosawa. Takashi Shimura is veteran police officer Detective Sato, tolerant, good-humoured, practical concerning the prospects for holding, if not eradicating crime, and Toshiro Mifune is his companion, rookie cop Murakami, a part of the brand new, considerate postwar technology involved with upbringing and psychology. Murakami teaches the older man the unfamiliar time period “après-guerre” to explain his new attitudes, though he must be reminded that the police is totally different from the military, much less regimented and extra about initiative. Mifune remains to be a younger man of 29 on this movie, though he clearly exhibits that tremendous pure severity and martial the Aristocracy.
Murakami suffers the unthinkable humiliation {and professional} castration of getting his handgun stolen (a real-life scenario from the Tokyo police case recordsdata researched by Kurosawa and his co-writer Ryuzo Kikushima); what’s extra, he loses the gun to a wily feminine pickpocket (Teruko Kishi), who sells it on to a black-market firearms dealer within the metropolis’s underbelly, who in flip “rents” it to a petty hoodlum, embittered by getting his kitbag stolen after being demobbed. Murakami ruefully remembers the identical factor taking place to him after the conflict and considers how simply he himself might have turned to crime. This child is now avid for money to impress his chorus-line girlfriend Harumi (Keiko Awaji) and his incompetent crimes escalate in seriousness and violence. Murakami is determined, in a race in opposition to time to trace down the weapon and the perpetrator – the “stray canine” – whereas redeeming his personal honour and stopping any extra bloodshed for which he feels himself accountable.
There are unforgettable sequences: the ballistics division microscope matching up bullet fragments, the Hitchcockian second through which the gun seller is tracked down at a baseball match, a nightclub’s backstage altering room the place the younger dancers collapse right into a sweaty, near-comatose heap within the insufferable warmth – and the person whose spouse has been murdered, ripping up her ripened tomato vegetation in a frenzy of rage and despair. And on a regular basis Murakami is in psychological turmoil, a frame of mind which the old-hand Sato counsels him in opposition to. Murakami feels responsible, however Sato retains telling him that if it wasn’t his gun, it might be another person’s; after all, you could take pains to make sure your gun isn’t stolen, but it surely makes no nice general distinction to the quantum of crime which they need to unendingly preserve below management. Murakami can’t or gained’t take in that lesson, and his ordeal is the heart beat that drives the story onward.
Additionally reissued, to coincide with a retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, is Kurosawa’s 1963 film Excessive and Low (★★★★★). This epic noir procedural, in stark monochrome enlivened with a mischievous contact of colourised pink at one second, is tailored from Ed McBain’s hardboiled US thriller King’s Ransom, and transplanted from the 87th police precinct of McBain’s fictional metropolis Isola (based mostly on New York) to Yokohama in fashionable Japan, the place the financial system is beginning to increase with American-style shopper items, widening the hole between the haves and have-nots.
Kurosawa’s shrewd use of American supply materials comes three years after Preston Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven, based mostly on his personal traditional Seven Samurai; Kurosawa right here offers us two Japanese boys taking part in at cowboys, with six-shooters and Winchesters, the daddy of 1 approving of their winner-takes-all violent gunplay. It’s a cynical story from the large metropolis that may have Billy Wilder.
Mifune, together with his typical fierce leonine handsomeness, performs Gondo, an government with a shoe firm who takes pleasure within the agency’s well-crafted product and resents his colleagues’ plans to extend revenue margins with shoddier items. Gondo has a secret scheme to impose his personal imaginative and prescient by taking a controlling curiosity within the (publicly owned) firm, rashly mortgaging the household dwelling to purchase up a majority shareholding – to the stricken horror of his loyal spouse Reiko (Kyoko Kagawa, the youngest daughter from Ozu’s Tokyo Story) whose personal marriage dowry is the supply of their monetary stability.
However simply as he’s about to dispatch his duplicitous underling Kawanishi (Tatsuya Mihashi) with a cheque to finish this gorgeous boardroom coup, Gondo hears {that a} kidnapper has made a chaotic try to kidnap his adored son – however by chance as a substitute took the son of Gondo’s heartbreakingly loyal and submissive chauffeur Aoki (Yutaka Sada). The perpetrator is demanding a king’s ransom or the boy dies. Can Gondo relinquish his company goals and face destroy to avoid wasting the son of a servant?
The film is fascinatingly flavoured from the very outset by the information that we all know Gondo’s defiant intuition is to not do it; he angrily proclaims his refusal in entrance of his spouse, the police and the agonised chauffeur himself. Nevertheless, reluctant settlement is pressured on him by his enemies’ power-play, instigated by the slippery Kawanishi who additionally claims that refusing to assist would blacken Gondo’s repute – a fairly appropriate assumption, in actual fact, as Gondo is to develop into a press hero for doing the alternative.
Kurosawa coolly takes the story wherever it must go, giving us sufficient storytelling materials to fill an entire streaming-TV collection as bold as The Wire, with company politics, cop stoicism, resentment boiling from the town’s poor and chortlingly cynical journalists who could be manipulated. After totally 55 minutes in Gondo’s luxurious dwelling originally, tensely discussing issues with the police, we then go to a fraught motion sequence on a commuter practice for the money handover, then to the sweaty world of the police station home for the detective work (that includes Kurosawa’s repertory veteran Takashi Shimura). Right here Aoki tries to reclaim a few of his personal shattered manhood and self-respect by doing a little sleuthing together with his boy. Within the third act, Gondo himself is sort of completely forgotten till his queasy closing encounter with the kidnapper.
The film offers us an intense, forensic scrutiny of police surveillance footage of the kidnapper’s accomplices, a bizarre premonition of Antonioni’s Blow-Up or the Zapruder movie. Kurosawa’s movie can also be one of many first to offer us the “kidnap” trope that’s to dominate movie and TV from then on: the taunting telephone dialog with the legal terminating simply earlier than the decision could be traced, the sound of particular issues within the dialog’s background which permit sharp cops to determine the place the person should be making the decision.
Poor Gondo. He was the final word capitalist: a risk-taker, a deal-maker, a person who had brilliantly sized up the scenario and had the braveness to grab his likelihood, however at all times with a excessive and ethical purpose in view. He needed to make first rate footwear for the individuals. Nevertheless it ends in calamity, and it isn’t in any respect clear if he thinks his compromised ethical heroism and sacrifice has been value it. A tremendous, sustained piece of film-making bravura from Kurosawa.
Supply hyperlink
