STRAY DOG, but it's John C. Reilly losing his gun, feeling unmanned, unidentified, praying desperately for its recovery, fearing he'll get axed by God, becoming the laughing stock of his police unit, enduring allegorical purgatory. Fin. I see what you did there PTA. Very clever. Now on to Kurosawa's STRAY DOG, the original cop-losing-his-gun narrative that looks to the seedy underworld of postwar Japan to find it. 

According to my brother, a veteran of Japan for several years, no film better captures the country's sweltering, drenching heat than this one. You could fry eggs on these actors bodies, it's that ruthless. You could make a sweatshake out of all that dripping perspiration, it's that gross. 

The heatwave serves an important, disorienting purpose –it matches the humid feeling of an entire country exhausted and defeated by the long war, especially as it relates to the fear of losing employment and keeping resources in stock. There's a reason Japan took to the black markets after the war. Millions of citizens were displaced by the air raids, leaving the country in shambles trying to secure the basic of necessities. With resources scarce, inflation high, and despair pandemic, many turned to the black markets desperate for food, for work, for anything to quell the nagging sense of "kyodatsu" (war exhaustion). 

This is important history for STRAY DOG, because taking a cop's gun away –the very thing that keeps him employed – during the broiling height of national defeat could very well mean a death sentence. Kurosawa taps into the same economic despair as De Sica in BICYCLE THIEVES, another story about losing a commercial tool that provides a living; or rather, about having said tool stolen from you during a heated time when everyone's desperately flailing their arms against impending despair. Mifune goes from gangster, to doctor, to now policeman. As Ritchie states, "His only identity is his pistol. If you take that away from him you take away everything…If he loses his position, he has no place in society. He becomes a stray." 

The sizzling heat only makes Mifune's search for the lost gun worse, because he's not just searching for the gun, he's searching for his livelihood. When he learns, to his horror, that the lost gun has been sold into the black market and is being used for criminal activity, the film's atmospheric heat smelts despair into guilt, even going as far as Mifune confusing the crimes as his own. Hearing how the gun was used to murder someone, he laments: "It is my fault….it was my gun." As he plunges further into the sleazy underworld of the black markets, he begins to learn a little more about his thief. Turns out he's a war veteran, like Mifune, someone who resorted to crime to cope with his declining morale since returning home. It's a perspective De Sica only ever imagined us to infer, a vision that endows Mifune with the ability to identify with, perhaps even empathize with his perpetrator —the very person he's supposed to arrest. Suddenly the world of stealing isn't so black and white, it's replete with glistening shades of troubled grey. 

In a climatic fight between cop and robber, hero and villain, Kurosawa blurs the boundary between them in their attempt to kill each other. It's sorta like imagining Antonio confronting the man who stole his bike and them realizing they're in the same economic train wreck together. They're both frightened, their clothes muddied, they almost look identical. As they stare breathlessly at each other in a fearful fumble, they might even be communicating telepathically: "We're both ex-soldiers of a failed war. We're both stray dogs, both had something stolen from us. We're just trying to make ends meet." It's a compelling moment that reveals something about their shared history living in postwar Japan, something that remarkably caused one to become a cop and another a criminal, two sides of the same existential coin. As my friend Darren put it: "This was the society Japan was building in the late 1940s, as all the broken men had to be dealt with. Some are criminals, some are policemen, but they're both moulded from the same conflict." 

Isn't it interesting how the same conflict has the ability to provoke wildly different reactions? "Bad luck either makes a man or destroys him," says a police inspector. To grasp the psyche of both criminal and cop is to grasp the desperate social conditions of postwar Japan. It is to fathom the hardship of Japanese veterans who were marginalized like stray dogs, met with public hostility for their war crimes, and stigmatized for entering the frays of the black market. Perhaps the lost gun is a symbol of something Japan lost during the war, the way their military power and traditions were crushed under westernization and occupational forces. Maybe Kurosawa has purposefully confused cop and robber to suggest something about the seductive failings of "might makes right," when the irony of imperial Japan losing its might forced them into a position to reevaluate the proverb. 

Like DRUNKEN ANGEL, where the gangster was ultimately fighting himself, STRAY DOG seems to be a story about a cop chasing after and fighting himself, if only to grasp the mindset of the criminal. In a parallel universe, under different economic circumstances, Mifune could have easily made the choice of the criminal, and the criminal could have easily been the cop. Grasping these environmental nuances isn't to suggest imperiled agency, but to admit the complexity involved with hungry, desperate people. It is to exude compassion in an ever-greying, tangled world. 

As Ritchie suggests, seeing the cop and criminal on the same spectrum will require "complete compassion, complete understanding, the knowledge that warring sides are identical; that black and white are really the same; that there is no high, no low; no heaven, no hell." Pretty bold thesis, if true, let alone practiced.

Kurosawa Ranked