Stray Dog (BFI) (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Akira KurosawaRelease Date(s)
1949 (January 27, 2025)Studio(s)
Shintoho/Film Art Association/Toho Co., Ltd. (The British Film Institute)- Film/Program Grade: A
- Video Grade: B
- Audio Grade: B
- Extras Grade: C+
Review
[Editor’s Note: This disc is Region B only. The film review below is by Todd Doogan, adapted from his look at the 2009 Criterion AK100 DVD release. The Blu-ray video, audio, and extras comments are by Bill Hunt.]
It’s a brutally hot summer day when rookie detective Murakami (Toshirô Mifune) has his police-issue Colt pistol lifted from his jacket pocket on a crowded trolley. Racked with shame (keep in mind that the Japanese have strict prohibitions on guns, even to this day), he reports the theft to his superiors, who simply dock him half pay for the next three months and send him on his way. Not one to stand idly by, Murakami goes undercover to try and locate the pistol, walking amid the dregs of post-war Tokyo in a movie-halting (yet oddly captivating) 9-minute montage sequence filmed in and around actual Japanese slums. It’s not until he gets paired up with veteran detective Sato (Kurosawa company player Takashi Shimura) that he starts to close in on his target.
But then something happens—something that sends shivers down Murakami’s spine: Whoever has the gun is using it to commit crimes and people are getting hurt. There are seven bullets in his Colt. That means seven potential victims, and Murakami is willing to do anything he can to ensure that those remaining bullets never get fired.
Stray Dog is equal parts film noir (with its very Western use of language and procedure) and social commentary (mainly focused on disenfranchised youth coming home from the war to a world struggling to pull itself back together around them), and it excels on both fronts. The film noir conventions take great influence from the work of both American expat director Jules Dassin (Brute Force, The Naked City, and Thieves Highway) and French pulp writer Georges Simenon, with Sato owing more than a passing nod to Simenon’s greatest creation, Jules Maigret. But the film’s true power comes from its commentary. Both Murakami and the villain of the tale (Yusa, played by Isao Kimura, who would join Mifune, Shimura, and Kurosawa again five years later as Seven Samurai member Katsushiro) share very similar pasts. Both are in their late 20s, both are back from the war and both arrived home to Tokyo and quickly had their duffle bags (containing their whole lives up until that point) stolen from them. But whereas Yusa chose a life of petty crime, Murakami chose to try and stop it. Kurosawa alludes to this “doppelganger” concept several times over the course of the film, and would later play it up on a bigger chessboard in High and Low, using a “have and have not” theme.
Stray Dog was shot by cinematographer Asakazu Nakai (Seven Samurai, Ran) on 35 mm B&W film using Mitchell cameras with spherical lenses, and it was released into theaters at the 1.37:1 aspect ratio. The BFI’s new Blu-ray edition takes advantage of a recent 4K scan and digital restoration of an original 35 mm master positive by Toho Archive Co. Ltd, in Setagaya, Japan. Once again, Toho’s restoration work is quite good, making this a nice upgrade of previous DVD editions (including those of both the BFI and Criterion). Once you get past the optically-printed opening titles (which exhibit the usual generation-loss softness), image detail is generally clean and well-refined, though there are occasional encoding issues in evidence, as well as some lingering age-related issues (light scratches, dust, etc). Optically-printed transitions (dissolves, wipes, etc) also show the expected softness. The film’s photochemical grain structure is intact and appropriately light-moderate. Shadows are dark, but there’s not as much detail retained in both the shadows and highlights as you’d see in an actual 4K image with HDR (and the highlights are a little blown out). This film is also notable for having a narrow depth of field—there’s a shot of Murakami searching records in the police archives for example (about 6:14 into the film) where he’s in focus but everyone behind him is blurry. Still, this is a solid HD upgrade for a B&W film of this vintage.
The film’s original mono audio mix has also been remastered for this release by Toho to reduce unwanted noise and age-related defects. It’s available here in 48kHz/24-bit LPCM 2.0 mono format. The track is largely clean and free of defects, with clear dialogue. Composer Fumio Hayasaka’s unique score is presented in good fidelity, serving to punctuate the image as much as to complement it. Optional subtitles in English are also included.
The BFI’s Blu-ray release (which is coded for Region B only) is a single disc that includes the remastered film in 1080p HD. The disc includes the following special features:
- Audio Commentary by Kenta McGrath
- A Japanese Tale (2024) (HD – 31:27)
- Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create – Stray Dog (SD – 32: 39)
The audio commentary with McGrath, a Japanese-Australian short subject and documentary filmmaker, was newly-recorded for this release by the BFI. Likewise, A Japanese Tale is also a new BFI bonus that features film scholar Jasper Sharp (author of the 2011 book Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema) discussing Stray Dog and its place in Kurosawa’s filmography. Meanwhile, the obligatory episode of It Is Wonderful to Create is part of a larger documentary series created in 2002. It offers great stories, behind-the-scenes stills, and retrospective interviews with members of Kurosawa’s cast and crew.
Note that this release does not include the excellent audio commentary by Kurosawa historian Stephen Prince that appears on the 2004 Criterion DVD.
The disc also comes packaged in a thicker UK-style Amaray case with a cardboard slipcase. Inside, you’ll find a 17-page booklet featuring credits, restoration notes, and essays by Barry Forshaw, Philip Kemp, and Akira Kurosawa himself (excerpted from Sight and Sound magazine’s 1964 Kurosawa on Kurosawa article).
At the time of its release, Stray Dog was Kurosawa’s best film since Drunken Angel. It blends the world of post-war Japan perfectly with the Western influences Kurosawa was critical of (and yet adopted, at least in part) in his work. And though he would later consider it a disappointment, Stray Dog was by no means a failure and stands tall alongside other classic film noirs of the 1940s. For the moment, this Blu-ray represents the film’s best A/V presentation to date, though we certainly hope that the BFI, Criterion, or both will release it on 4K disc as soon as possible.
-Todd Doogan and Bill Hunt
(You can follow Bill on social media on Twitter, BlueSky, and Facebook, and also here on Patreon)