Cinema: Tokyo Manhunt

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Stray Dog, made in 1949 by Japanese Director Akira Kurosawa, is a less expert thriller but a deeper movie than his recent High and Low. Both are cops-and-robbers chase films, starring Toshiro Mifune. But the older work, aglow with zest and freshness, displays abundantly two qualities of Kurosawa's ripening genius: the ability to make moving pictures move, and an aching compassion for his fellow men.

The story is so naively contrived that the audience at times must swallow it out of simple generosity. Mifune—appearing 15 years trimmer and every muscular inch a star—plays an idealistic rookie detective whose confidence is shaken when a pickpocket steals his .38 Colt on a crowded bus. He plunges into the Tokyo underworld to find it; and in a long sequence without a word of dialogue interrupting the flow of images, Kurosawa pulls the viewer right in after him. Mifune joins forces with a wise old sleuth (Takashi Shimura), and the two men track a killer through a series of crimes keyed to the seven deadly bullets in the missing gun.

But Kurosawa uses plot merely as a device to view postwar Japan—a nation laid waste, exhausted in defeat, sorting out by slow social processes the stray dogs that forage among the ruins. Though the film runs two hours, much longer than necessary, its best scenes are unforgettably good. Cheering throngs at a Tokyo baseball stadium provide background for one tingling chase. In a city overcome by heat, the camera searches a line of chorus girls collapsed on a dressing-room floor, flesh glistening with sweat, each face a breathless distillation of despair. After a murder, a closeup of a splattered tomato—despite the obvious symbolism—suddenly, almost insidiously, conveys the whole meaning of horror and grief combined.

In the film's brilliant climax, Mifune and his quarry battle in a flower-strewn thicket outside a suburban home where a housewife is practicing the piano. Mifune is shot, but hunter and hunted go on fighting through mud and marsh until they drop at last onto a bed of shrubbery. As a group of children go singsonging along the road nearby, both lie gasping, indistinguishable one from the other. Which is which? Kurosawa tenderly draws the line between good and evil: the killer begins to sob.