Noir is the most fatalistic of genres. Chaos and carnage lurk at the end of every back-alley, no matter how carefully you craft a plan or how noble you claim your intentions to be. There is always some fly in the ointment or some squeaky wheel which will threaten a disaster for as long as the filmmakers care to stretch it out before delivering on that threat. The best of noir, such as Kubrick’s The Killing, turn that inevitability of disaster into both a jaw-dropping punchline and a direct statement on mankind’s relationship with the world around us. The more we seek to control, the more damage we are likely to produce.
For most film noir, the trick of the tale is in the way that the protagonists try to either evade said disaster, or create distance between themselves and the fallout once it occurs. The end-game of such films is the tragic realization that of course you can’t outrun sin. You may defer punishment for a time, you may even get away with the loot, or the dame, or whatever else it was that you were willing to submit to your baser instincts to achieve. But the world does not hand out happy endings, and there is always some fresh hell waiting to spring up, no matter how hard you run. The tension, normally, in a film noir is in how the protagonist copes with their knowledge of this truth versus their innate human desire to somehow break the pattern and escape blame and punishment.
So what to do, then, with Stray Dog, Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 detective film which takes that principle and reverses it from the outset? We are introduced to our hero, rookie homicide detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune, brilliant as always) as he stands before his superior officer and admits to a grievous error and begs forgiveness. His crime? He allowed his pistol to be stolen by a pickpocket while he was crammed onto an impossibly tight bus. We see in flashback that the theft was almost impossible to avoid and that Murakami made every conceivable effort to retrieve the gun. The remainder of the film follows Murakami as he desperately searches for his lost pistol, determined to retrieve it before any of its seven rounds can be used to harm an innocent.
He is less than successful, which is what gives Stray Dog an interesting edge over similar procedurals. The ticking clock elapses with well over an hour left in the film, meaning the remainder of the runtime is devoted to watching how Murakami sweats through his feelings of rage and guilt and horror, all the while struggling to find some kind of moral course in a world that seems to care nothing for his worries. Again and again Murakami is told by criminals and cops alike that the loss of his gun was not his fault and amounts to little more than a blip in the statistics of crime and devastation which plague every day in the city. Kurosawa even undercuts tension where you might have been expecting it. Modern audiences would probably expect the film to revolve around Murakami’s superior officers hounding him to turn up the gun or face punishment, but instead the higher-ups are all unerring in their support of the guy, constantly offering assistance and reminding him that it was not his fault that the gun was stolen and crimes committed. No one is willing to pass moral judgment on Murakami, leaving him in sole control of his guilt. Surely, he is told, the criminal who is using it would have bought a different gun had Murakami’s been unavailable. Taking the blame onto his own soul helps nothing.
But he takes it anyway. Murakami never stops punishing himself for every offense that the wretch has committed with his pistol, nor can he help himself from comparing and contrasting his life with the man whom he’s chasing. Both are veterans who experienced a crushing psychic blow when their meager possessions were stolen as they trekked home from the war. But whereas Murakami used the incident as fuel to join the police force and fight for order and decency, the thief has apparently used the theft as an excuse to punish the entire world for the lack of morality he found that day. It’s a fascinating duality that plays across the film which (given that one half of the duo only appears in the final minutes and has next to no dialogue) is an impressive feat.
That’s where Toshiro Mifune comes in. Mifune remains one of the most imposing cinematic presences in the history of the medium, and no one tapped into that like Kurosawa. Mifune could be a vibrating ball of raw-nerve energy (which you could find in films like Rashomon or Seven Samurai) or an impossibly stoic figure of resolve (Hidden Fortress, the Sanjuro films) or both (Throne of Blood). But these are all historical films, and it’s interesting that in the two contemporary-set noir films he made with Kurosawa, (this and the masterpiece High and Low) Mifune plays men who are utterly impotent to stop the forces of greed and violence which seem to overwhelm the world. Similarly, both films hinge on a mid-movie turn in which the seeming main objective (find the gun before it’s used; keep the kidnappers from getting the money) has failed, leaving Mifune’s heroes broken.
Whereas High and Low at that point abandons Mifune so it can focus on the rippling effect of his choice, Stray Dog leaves him in the crosshairs, letting you study the way that failure and guilt wrack him body and soul. And Mifune, to his eternal credit, is willing to go all the way. There is nothing dignified or macho about the trials he forces himself to endure, and it would be easy to expect an actor to want to downplay the humiliation and weakness within the film’s second half. There’s a scene late in the game where a hoarse, hysterical Murakami is screaming at fellow cops, demanding to know if a recent gunshot victim was struck by one of his bullets. Kurosawa captures the moment in a single shot, refusing to take the camera off Mifune as he wails and begs his peers to tell him the truth. In sequences like this, it’s difficult to even look at the performer.
The questions of guilt and responsibility are never resolved in the film. While Stray Dog comes to a clean narrative ending, the emotional storyline remains frustratingly open. Yes, the guilty party has been apprehended, but there is no undoing his crimes. And there is the question of what exactly any of this has accomplished. One criminal has been arrested, some guns have been confiscated, but at what cost to time, to moral, to soul? In the brief glimpse we get of the crook, we can see he’s no fiendish mastermind bedeviling the streets for play and profit. Kurosawa characterizes the titular cur as a venal and pathetic weakling, someone whose major fault was lacking the moral fortitude to stand against the temptations of the world as Murakami has.
But Murakami did feel those temptations, and he knows how easy it would have been to give in. He’s told not to empathize with the man he’s just hunted, broken, and locked up, but it’s clear that he did, and does, and will continue to. And we, the audience, who have seen the same portrait of desperation and despair that Murakami has, feel that empathy as well.
Film noir teaches audience members to trust no one and suspect everything. Every woman who smiles at our hero as they walk down the street is probably planning a double-cross, and every innocuous seeming scene is bubbling over with the threat of violence. The chaos and darkness of the genre becomes cliché. We grow so accustomed to this outlook that it becomes almost default.
Murakami is assured that he will experience this same desensitization, that he will learn not to care or remember anything about the criminals who plague the streets. He’ll learn to stop viewing them as people, he is assured. Based on the grim, troubled look on Mifune’s face, we know that this ‘solution’ troubles him just as much as any of the questions posed. By questioning the entire foundation of the procedural, Stray Dog drops the mic on a genre which had only just begun to come of age.
