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Stray Dog (1949)
Stray Dog is a 1949 Japanese crime drama noir film directed and co-written by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. It was Kurosawa's second film of 1949 produced by the Film Art Association and released by Shintoho. It is also considered a detective movie that explores the mood of Japan during its painful postwar recovery, as well as a precursor to the contemporary police procedural and…
Directed by Akira Kurosawa · Shot by Asakazu Nakai · Cut by Akira Kurosawa · Music by Fumio Hayasaka · Ratio Academy ratio · 122 min
How it was made
- Kurosawa sent co-writer Ryuzo Kikushima to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to gather real case files, and they built the script around a case of a young detective who lost his pistol.
- Kurosawa first worked out the story as an unpublished novel, writing it in about six weeks, then adapted it into a screenplay over roughly two months, abandoning the novel's chronological structure once he found its pacing unsuitable for drama.
- More than thirty sets were built at a Toho-rented studio for the production, and the baseball scene was filmed at the real Korakuen Stadium.
- Ishiro Honda, later the director of Godzilla, served as Kurosawa's chief assistant, shooting the second-unit footage for the ten-minute sequence of Murakami wandering through Tokyo and doubling for Toshiro Mifune in waist shots.
- An ASPCA representative accused Kurosawa of deliberately infecting a dog with rabies to get the opening shot of a panting dog, forcing him to write a formal denial to American occupation officials.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Akira Kurosawa
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