Stray Dog (1949)

Original title

野良犬

Directed by

Akira Kurosawa

Genre

drama film, crime film, film noir, buddy film

Country

Japan

Runtime

2h 02m

Rated

M

Rating

7.6 of 10 from 361 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A detective's gun is stolen, and he teams up with an older, weary cop to track it down through Tokyo's seedy underworld. The search forces them to confront the desperation and poverty of post-war Japan.

tenseatmosphericmelancholicgrittyslow-burnnoir-ishgroundedcerebral

What happens

Stray Dog (Japanese: 野良犬, Hepburn: Nora inu) is a 1949 Japanese crime drama noir film directed and co-written by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. It was Kurosawa's second film of 1949 produced by the Film Art Association and released by Shintoho. It is also considered a detective movie (among the earliest films in that genre) that explores the mood of Japan during its painful postwar recovery, as well as a precursor to the contemporary police procedural and buddy cop film genres, based on its premise of pairing two cops with different personalities and motivations together on a difficult case. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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