Sherry Chandler » Stray Dog
Stray Dog
Image from Wikimedia Commons
Released in 1949, Akira Kurosawa’s film Stray Dog revolves around two World War II veterans who are mirror images of one another. Both men had seen and done terrible things and, sort of like Viet Nam and Iraq War veterans in the U.S., both as veterans were spurned by their society for the terrible things they had seen and done in its service.
Discharged into a disordered world, each soldier has had his knapsack stolen. The crux of the story is how each man responds to this theft of all their worldly goods, this final betrayal by the society that sent them into futile and bloody war. Murakami (the incomparable Toshiro Mifune) joins the police and works to restore order. Yusa joins the underworld and becomes the stray dog of the title.
The two men are connected by Murakami’s Colt pistol. The pistol is lifted from Murakami’s pocket on a crowded bus. It becomes a commodity on Tokyo’s black market, where Yusa (Isao Kimura) leases it, giving his rice ration card for security, to pull an armed robbery to get money to court his girlfriend. That the black market leases guns instead of selling them indicates how scarce they were in post-war Japan and what a power symbol this small colt is.
Murakami, obsessed by guilt for releasing this instrument of violence upon his city, haunts the black market until he traces it to a girl who says she rented it to Yusi. Because he is a rookie, Murakami arrests the girl and, in doing so, not only misses the more important connection to her gang boss but also keeps Yusi from returning the pistol. And so the cycle of guilt and violence spirals until the film’s climax, the inevitable face off between the two men.
There is another mirrored pair in this story: the rookie cop Murakami and his older mentor Sato (the equally incomparable Takashi Shimura). This mirroring is of course youth, age, innocence, experience — though as a veteran, Muakami is hardly innocent — passion, and wisdom, but perhaps most obviously for this film, the pre-war and the post-war generations. Sato is from a time of high order and his view of criminality is much simpler than Murakami’s. For him, Yusa is not doppelganger but stray dog.
Some elements of this film serve almost as documentary for a generation of Americans who did not live through World War II and whose only knowledge of the U.S. occupation of Japan comes from our own propaganda. One is the 8-minute segment during which Murakami wanders through the Tokyo black markets trying to find a gun-seller. Eight minutes is forever in cinema time, and this sequence is shot in the real black market with a hidden camera by Inoshiro Honda, who will later do the Godzilla films. No dialogue, just mean streets.
There are signs of occupation everywhere. The characters wear western dress. When Murakami identifies the woman who picked his pocket on the bus, his colleague is at first doubtful because this woman always wore a kimono and Murakami said she was wearing a dress. Women only seem to wear kimonos in their homes in this film. This same pickpocket, under questioning, also demands her civil rights, a concept introduced by occupation forces.
The dog shown panting in the opening sequences was also the subject of some controversy. Occupation censors accused Kurosawa of injecting the animal with rabies in order to get a realistic shot and Kurosawa had to go to great lengths to prove that they had simply exercised the dog to make it pant.
I do need to mention the heat, which serves as a major trope in this motion picture. The heat seves as a marker of Murakami’s descent into the underworld and moral relativism. He starts out a young turk, a hero in a shiney white suit and white shoes and ends up, after his battle with his shadow Yusa, wounded and slimed with swamp water. But everybody in this film gets grubbier and grubbier. Sato constantly uses a handkerchief to wipe grime from his brow and arms, Murakami’s white suit becomes sweated through. Showgirls collapse in a limp sweaty pile backstage. Hotel clerk and mobster alike live within the range of the old oscillating electric fans of the day.
In the end, Murakami confronts his shadow self and overcomes him but, as in all quest stories, not without suffering a wound both physical and psychic. The shadow he confronts is not just his own, but that of his society that will not or cannot assimilate and forgive its returned and defeated soldiers.
Tellingly, in the final scenes, a middle-class girl practicing Mozart on the piano overhears the shot that wounds Murakami. She comes to the window, looks out, yawns, and goes back to her piano.
Yusa, capture and handcuffed, wails and wails. It is an eery, epic mourning for all that has been lost.
Stray Dog is a long and visually complex black and white film. I haven’t begun to hit on all the elements of the plot here, let alone the camera work and the performances. An excellent ensemble cast, including the 29-year-old Mifune in pretty much his breakthrough performance. The next year, in 1950, Kurosawa would make Roshomon and stake off in a new direction.
Good review at Bright Lights Film Journal and Images
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