In the Tokyo noir that set the buddy-cop standard, a lone gun is a matter of life and death

Accompanying him on that quest is his crusty, kindly mentor Satō (Takashi Shimura), the kind of cop so close to retirement he can taste it. Their dynamic would soon become as familiar as any other in the genre, but it’s Murakami’s initial solo expedition, going undercover on the wrong side of the tracks as the very kind of man he’s pursuing, that gives Stray Dog its empathy and helps make its moral struggle a relatable one between recognizable people. The montage, where the detective really is mistaken for a vagrant and really is dying for a public drinking fountain, starts breaking down his stiff, self-flagellating self-seriousness—the kind of thinking that has him turning in his resignation rather than committing to solving the case. It’s all caught in Mifune’s intense, anxious eyes, flitting back and forth while crossfaded with scenes of the city streets (shot by a pre-Godzilla Ishirō Honda). And this mindset is directly rebuked by his weathered partner later in the movie: “Instead of brooding, prevent the next incident.”

Kurosawa is great at creating a hostile environment where the next incident feels inevitable, gun or no. The filmmaker is a master at blocking (watch High And Low to see the pinnacle of his abilities) and here fills every inch of his frames when on public transit, amid a crowded skeevy bar, or deep in the police archives to make the air feel hot and close, your breathing stifled and mind distracted just like Murakami’s. Everyone’s got a fan or a sweat rag or a loose, soaked-through linen suit. Cops and crooks share popsicles like cigarettes. Entire scenes are filmed through the wire cage of a rotating fan. Even a baseball game—yes, the shaggy film takes the time to show a decent amount of baseball—feels a little more dangerous because of the heat. Kurosawa fanatic Spike Lee would use a sweltering city summer to similar effect in Do The Right Thing, where racial tension stood in for the economic desperation of Japan’s après-guerre.

The ethical stances of its cops—the black-and-white justifications of its old-timer and the empathetic understanding of its greenhorn—are simply their ways of getting through the practical pains of the day. Whether they think that bad guys are just bad, as the veteran says, or that there are simply “bad situations” rather than evil people, the fact remains that a police gun is on the street, causing more crime, harming people who otherwise might’ve made it home safe. As the duo counts down the number of bullets remaining as the perp fires them off during the course of his crimes, psychoanalysis fades away. They just need to stop this stray dog who, through little real fault of his own, has turned rabid.

There’s little more tragic than this acceptance. It doesn’t matter that Murakami comes to understand that the man who stole his gun is just a version of himself. It doesn’t matter that, after a long day and night tailing a suspect, he allows himself to take a breather and look up at the stars with her. Satō already has this kind of peaceful rapport with the criminal element—just like Reikichi Kawamura’s older cop at the start of the film, who’s got a Humphrey Bogart-like hangdog aura when chitchatting with a female pickpocket—but he’s also decided that a certain level of injustice is just part of the job. He has a contradictory calm around this, a self-preserving perspective that helps him go home at night to his kids after a long day with the riffraff. Maybe it’s his war experience that won’t let Murakami come to easy terms with this. He’s seen men just like him give in to bloodlust. He’s watched rabies take hold of a stray before his eyes. But in the end, he still does his job, like a noir gumshoe coming of age over the course of a few obsessive hours.