silver nitrate notes

Stray Dog and the Lost Pistol

8 mar 2019

I have been promising a post on Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1949) for years. A reader chided me about it in the guestbook back in 2026. Here it is, finally. The cinematographer was Asakazu Nakai, whom we have met on Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and Ikiru. Stray Dog is Nakai's first substantial collaboration with Kurosawa.

The premise is tight. A young detective, Murakami (Mifune again), has his pistol stolen by a pickpocket on a Tokyo bus. He spends the rest of the film tracking the pistol through the black market, watching it change hands, and slowly recognising that his own moral position is not meaningfully different from that of the thief who now uses the pistol for armed robbery.

Nakai photographs postwar Tokyo as a geography of heat. The summer of 1949, when the film was shot, was one of the hottest on record. Kurosawa wanted the heat visible on screen. Nakai added heat waves to the image by shooting through distorted glass and by framing sequences so that the sun glinted into the lens. Characters sweat. Fans turn. The Ueno market sequence, where Murakami disguises himself as a beggar and searches for the pistol, was shot with actual market footage over several days. Mifune wandered through real crowds. Nakai followed with a handheld camera. The sequence lasts nearly ten minutes of screen time, most of it documentary in feel.

The final confrontation, in a field of white flowers, is the film's compositional peak. Murakami and the thief, who have been shadows of each other throughout, wrestle in the flowers. Nakai shoots the struggle from a high angle so that the white flowers dominate the frame and the two figures become dark shapes moving in them. The sound of cicadas in the background is almost unbearably loud on clean transfers. The scene ends with both men face-down in the flowers, exhausted. They are indistinguishable from each other, which is the film's point.

[ « prev: Sunset Boulevard · next: To Be or Not to Be » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press, 3rd ed. 1998.
[2] Prince, Stephen. The Warrior's Camera. Princeton UP, rev. ed. 1999.
[3] Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Knopf, 1982.
[4] Criterion Collection essay by Terrence Rafferty, 2004.