As a break to my usual diet of crappy low budget cinema, I've been watching foreign films. Like many others, my first Kurosawa film was "The Seven Samurai." I enjoyed his films, but until watching Stray Dog I thought that his work all took place in feudal Japan. This was one of Kurosawa's first films and was set in modern Japan.
Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune plays a rookie police officer whose gun is stolen on a hot summer day. The officer feels great shame and wants to track his stolen gun down. He manages to find a gun dealer in the seedy underworld who handled his Colt pistol. From there, he an a veteran detective track down his gun as it is used to commit armed robberies and a murder.
The focal point of this film is really Mifune's character. While tracking his stolen gun, he has to go incognito as a former soldier who is now living a life of desperation (we learn that his character really lived this life before getting a job with the police). He also learn that the suspect he is tracking lived the same life as he did, but took to a life of crime.
The changes in post war Japan also play a major role in this film. What really caught me was the change from the imperial Japanese way to the "modern" life. This is mostly seen through changes in dress, music and out look on life. At one point, we see a pick pocket who has traded in her kimonos (what used to be her trademark) for western style dresses. There's a mother who is trying to control her daughter who is a cabaret dancer and wants to have nice things no matter how she gets them. And the list goes on.
Kurosawa used a fantastic montage sequence involving Mifune's trip into the underworld that would bring tears to Fritz Lang's eye. The film can be gritty, yet sentimental. Kurosawa didn't like this film because he saw it as a failed effort to make a detective film in the style of French detective novels. I disagree. The film takes on its own life and gives an insight to westerners about how post war Japan feels.
Fantastic.