Stray Dog

Stray Dog (1949)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041699/]

The Gist:
This is an early film by Akira Kurosawa, essentially a detective piece that often slips into a smooth workable formula. However, there are constant moments in this film where you realize you are watching a Kurosawa film. The film starts out with an anonymous voice over that sets up the action (the theft of a policeman's gun) and as the film goes on it turns into a desperate pursuit of the criminal who has ended up with the gun and has put it to terrible use. There are some complex themes at work here, namely the guilt of the younger police officer who tries to take responsibility for the bad his gun has wrought. However, what really makes the film shine are these spontaneous moments of beauty, like how the older policeman takes the rookie to his house and gets toasted on sake, shows him his family sleeping, laments about the nature of being cop. There is something about these quiet moments that makes Stray Dog feel more powerful than some of his other masterworks, because here they felt beautifully unpredictable, not so deliberate.