Akira Kurosawa is known mostly for his historical films, which typically incorporate samurais and Toshiro Mifune. Stray Dog, on the other hand, takes place in post-War Japan and travels its mean streets convincingly, though, truth be told, it also features Toshiro Mifune (thankfully in one of his better and less histrionic performances). <br /><br />Mifune, a greenhorn homicide detective, has his gun pinched on a bus-ride home from target practice; the remainder of the movie finds him searching for his missing pistol, first undercover as a homeless veteran and then under the tutelage of Takashi Shimura's Detective Sato. <br /><br />It's a crime movie, plain and simple, but Kurosawa digs deeper than that, exploring the postwar sludge of his homeland. Mifune's Detective Murakami and the criminal Yusa are, ostensibly, mirror images of one another--both are young veterans who had their possessions stolen from them on the train-ride home after the war. Murakami, as he explains, almost snapped but chose the righteous path and became a cop; Yusa became a petty thief and then a murderer. <br /><br />The exploration of the travails of the postwar Japanese youth is fascinating--just as fascinating as Kurosawa's dissection of history and storytelling in Rashomon. However, unlike Kurosawa's greater films (Dodes'ka-den and Rashomon), Stray Dog still feels like a young man's work. This was his ninth or tenth film, I think, and he was finally coming into his own on a visual level (there are some stunningly filmed sequences and his framing and arrangements are divine). However, the film, for all its intelligence, lacks subtlety, at least in translation. The concept of Yusa and Murakami as doubles, in a sense, is driven home often and obviously--Kurosawa does not require his audience to do any work of its own; everything is spelled out conveniently. It's a shame Kurosawa lacked trust in his audience because this film might have been his best if it had had a little more gentle of a hand. Murakami's distress over his gun being used in crimes also seems a little heavy-handed. Perhaps it is a cultural thing (it probably is), but he seems to overreact. Yes, losing a gun is terrible, but, my man, despair is not the answer. <br /><br />In any event, Stray Dog is a very good film and should be watched more than it probably is. It's better than any of Kurosawa's historical films (excluding Rashomon) and a lot of fun too.