Stray Dog

NEW 35mm PRINT! ► One of the showpieces of our Kurosawa Centennial celebration is this new 35mm print of Stray Dog, “one of the greatest detective films ever made” (Elvis Mitchell, New York Times). Kurosawa’s sizzling film is a heat-stoked noir thriller with more than a dash of Dostoevsky, and offers an arrestingly atmospheric (and hellish) portrait of postwar Tokyo. Toshiro Mifune plays a new cop, awkward in his white suit, whose pistol is stolen on a crowded bus. Dishonoured, and fearful of losing his job, he tracks the pickpocket through the mean and menacing streets of a Tokyo in the midst of a sweltering summer heat wave. As his obsessive pursuit continues, disturbing parallels link the cop and his criminal prey. Stray Dog was adapted from Kurosawa’s own unpublished detective novel; the director has said of both novel and film, “I am very fond of Georges Simenon, and I wanted to do something in his manner.” “This is an even more important film than Rashomon but regrettably is still relatively unknown” (Georges Sadoul). “Mifune is magnetic . . . but the real star of Kurosawa’s amazing 1949 crime melodrama is the city itself, in all its heat and squalor” (Michael Sragow, New Yorker). B&W, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 122 mins.