Stray Dog

I recently watched Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (野良犬, 1949), a classic film noir set in Tokyo just after the war. Filmed in the sweltering Japanese summer, the heat and humidity pervades every frame, as sweat drips from the characters, slowly adding to the building tensions and frustrations.

The legendary Toshiro Mifune, of Rashomon and Seven Samurai fame, plays a headstrong, yet naive, young detective whose gun is stolen on a crowded bus. As his missing gun starts to be used in crimes, he desperately searches Tokyo's seedy underworld to track down the killer before more murders are committed. AllMovie.com notes that "Mifune, young and hungry, is tightly coiled in Stray Dog, a complicated mass of insecurity and bravado".

Stray Dog has classic noir elements, including shadowy lighting, urban crime, a man trapped in a living nightmare and an increasingly blurred sense of what is right or wrong. More than just a psychological crime thriller, it also contains a nine-minute montage that wordlessly captures post-war Tokyo's crowded streets and alleys, with real-life blackmarket figures, hawkers and drifters. All were filmed surreptitiously by Kurosawa as Mifune wandered the streets in Tokyo's sweltering summer.