One of the least explored aspects of Japanese cinema is the influence of European and American films. Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves sent a shock wave through international cinema when it was released in 1948. Made with very little money with non-professional actors, it was precisely the incentive many young filmmakers needed to made their own forays in their local idioms. Satyajit Ray claimed it was De Sica who inspired his Apu Trilogy made in his native Bengal. And a few years before his period film Rashomon took the West completely by surprise, Akira Kurosawa made Stray Dog, a film set in contemporary Tokyo about a young cop's struggle to retrieve a stolen pistol. Though Kurosawa claimed that his influences were Jules Dassin's The Naked City and the roman policiers of Georges Simenon, the plot of Stray Dog was clearly borrowed from Bicycle Thieves, about a poor man with a wife and child whose new job is imperiled when his bicycle is stolen.(2)
The title is ambiguous. Under the credits Kurosawa shows us a panting mongrel dog - an unrestrained, potentially dangerous creature without an owner. But "stray" is likely not an accurate translation. The French title offers a clue: Le Chien enragé. The Enraged Dog - Mad Dog or even Rabid Dog are probably closer to the Japanese nora. Assuming the thief is the dog, Kurosawa portrays him as an extreme exception, an aberration, an insult to the norm. A "stray" is a nuisance. This thief is a menace.
The film wastes no time. It opens with Murakami, a young detective, a veteran of the war (Toshiro Mifune in only his third film for Kurosawa), who reports the theft of his standard issue Colt pistol. In Japan, then as now, no one can own a gun. Cops are allowed to carry them in the sometimes dangerous pursuance of their duties, and they are available on the black market - which was thriving in post-war Japan. How many bullets were in it? the man taking his report asks. All seven, Murakami says, and then he offers to resign. His offer is denied. Murakami will have to find his pistol. Kurosawa cuts to cops firing the Colt pistol at target practice. A voice-over tells us how "compact" the Colt is. We then watch as he places it in the right-hand pocket of his white linen jacket. It's a hot summer in Tokyo.
When Murakami is getting off a crowded bus, he feels his pocket and his pistol is missing. He sees a man across the road who runs from him. Murakami gives chase but loses him at a crossroads. The man who stole the pistol is Yusa, a veteran, like Murakami, of the war. But instead of the straight and narrow path taken by Murakami, Yusa has taken the other way, into the underworld of Tokyo. Murakami is teamed with another detective, an older man named Satō, played by Takashi Shimura. A common thread in Kurosawa, the master and the acolyte, is explored again in Stray Dog.
Yaso's movements are easy to follow - everywhere a Colt bullet turns up in a crime. Kurosawa uses the detectives' pursuit of Yusa to explore the Tokyo of 1949, still under American occupation. When they enter the underworld, the "lower depths" of Tokyo, the film takes on a lurid, almost surreal hue. As Mifune learns the ropes from Satō, he also learns how a single misstep might have led him down the same road as Yusa. We are clearly meant to see a resemblance, albeit a superficial one, between the two ex-soldiers.
By the time Murakami captures Yusa, after he has tried to shoot Satō to death, Kurosawa's Dostoevskian theme at last emerges. Yusa knows he has fallen very far from grace and he must atone for his crimes. He lies side by side with Murakami in a meadow replete with flowers and the beauty of a world that Yusa had forsaken. He screams and writhes in apparent agony, and Murakami lies there beside him, amazed. Satō doesn't die of his wounds, congratulates Murakami and tells him to look forward to all their future cases together. Their bond is cemented, and the film ends on an upbeat note. But the nightmare vision of Tokyo's dark side is unforgettable. Kurosawa will take us back there in his great suspense film High and Low (1963), which expands on Kurosawa's view of the terrible duality of the modern world - the obscene gulf between the rich and the poor, the lucky and unlucky. There is no real choice in life for so many of us. We follow the path that presents itself to us, leading us into the darkness or into the light.
(1) "Polański and his co-scenarists, Jerzy Skolimowski and Jakub Goldberg probably got the idea for the script from the yacht scenes in René Clément's Plein Soleil, in which two men, one an experienced sailor (Maurice Ronet), the other not (Alain Delon), compete for the affections of a woman (Marie Lafôret). The woman belongs to the owner of the boat, who christened it ("Marge") after her. The boat in Knife in the Water is called "Christina." There is even a knife with which Delon in skillful."
(2) There is another roundabout reference to the influence of Bicycle Thieves. In his 2011 study, What Is Film Noir?, William Park detected the influence of neo-realism on the photographic style of The Naked City. Terrence Rafferty called Stray Dog "a kind of neorealist cop movie."
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