The Kurosawa Century #1: Post-War Noirs: Drunken Angel (1948) & Stray Dog (1949)

Drunken Angel (1948, 98 Minutes)

The fragile relationship between a doctor and patient shapes the tragic realism of Drunken Angel. An early entry in Akira Kurosawa's canon, the film starred Takashi Shimura (Sato) and Toshiro Mifune (Matsunaga). Set in a swampy area of Tokyo shortly after the war, the insular setting to the film reinforces its themes of existential angst and entrapment. 

Mifune's a low-level player in the Yakuza who's slowly being diminished by tuberculosis. Shimura is a local physician, also disappointed with his station in life and is struggling with alcoholism, offers treatment. While tuberculosis was curable, it required discipline from the patient. Sanada warns Matsunaga that he will slowly die if he refuses treatment, which required long periods of rest and no alcohol. 

When local kingpin arrives and mocks Matsunaga for refusing drink it leads to a downward spiral, a cycle of commitment to treatment and being pulled back into his violent life. After he overhears the Yakuza bosses' plan to remove him it leads to a violent climax.

The sense of fatalism and melancholy running through the film are best communicated through Dr. Sanada. He accepts that some patients will commit to improving themselves and others will not. Matsunaga considers leaving everything behind to focus on curing himself, but in true noir fashion, fate has other plans.

The partnership between Kurosawa and Mifune is important to film history, While Mifune would become known for playing Samurai warriors, he had remarkable range and it's on display in both films. As his coughing and condition worsens, he keeps looking thinner and, by the end he looks like a zombie. He brought some of the angsts associated with method actors like James Dean and Marlon Brando, but also the quiet resignation of Robert Mitchum. Kurosawa liked to let the camera linger on Mifune as he walked off into darkness. 

Kurosawa's mastery of composition begins to show itself, but there's also expressionism and a surreal dream sequence. Unlike many American noirs which often ended on a note despair or hopelessness, Kurosawa chose continuity as an ending.  

Stray Dog (1949, 122 Minutes)

If Stray Dogs isn't Kurosawa's first masterpiece, it's absolutely a near masterpiece. Set over a few days during a Tokyo heat wave, Toshiro Mifune stars as Detective Murakami who must recover his gun, a Colt, after a pickpocket lifted it on the train. The film is about an obsessive quest to find a gun in a vast urban space. Takashi Shimura co-stars as Detective Sato, a veteran who comes to the aid of high-strung Murakami. Influenced by the American noir The Naked City, Stray Dogs is a remarkably cinematic, subtle, and humanistic crime film. 

Stray Dog is considered a procedural, and it follows the familiar tropes: the bureaucratic drudgery of investigations, scenes in the forensic lab, and hours of searching through documents and paperwork. Kurosawa, clearly working with a bigger budget, employs many cinematic techniques. Montage sequences are used to build tension, gritty Tokyo settings and architecture to provide atmosphere, a tense and methodical sequence during a baseball game at a packed stadium, there's even a musical sequence. Over the two-hour run time Kurosawa builds an immersive world. 

Murakami learns his gun is linked to a string of shootings, increasing the urgency of the situation. The symbolic relationship between a detective is gun is another trope of crime fiction, like when a Captain takes away the badge and gun is symbolic. When an officer loses his gun it raises questions about his ability, and yes, there's also the emasculating aspect of the situation. Mifune plays it as an agonizing experience, the idea of not only having something stolen from you and having it used for awful deeds increases the hurt. The Colt serves as a great MacGuffin for the story, the script uses a countdown technique to great effect, referring to the number of bullets in the chamber.

Stray Dogs also uses the buddy cop formula long before it had a name. Mifune and Shimura are teamed up again to great effect. Sato warns Murakami, 'You can't be this tense all the time." He imparts wisdom but not in a condescending way, no grumbling about being teamed up with a rookie. Mifune brings angst and restless heroism. Their dynamic reminded me of that between Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in David Fincher's Se7en, I suspect this film was a major influence on Fincher. Later, Sato takes Murakami to visit his family in a warm scene, shades of Lethal Weapon. 

Kurosawa also takes a sociological approach. Tokyo was devastated after the war; the displacement of young people is a major theme. References are made to rationing and the American occupation. The Yakuza provided opportunities for disparate young man (Yasu) on the run. When Murakami and Sato visit the shantytown where Yasu lives, the assailant's sister and mother are both warm and sympathetic. They speak of him spending his free time reading comics and fantasizing about a better life. Murakami realizes his life was on a similar trajectory and begins to view the suspect as a shadow of himself. 

Sato warns Murakami, "let the crime novelists psychoanalyze." The final beats to the film move to a fatalistic conclusion like Drunken Angel, Sato leaves us with one last bit of wisdom, the longer one works as a cop, "the less sentimental you get." Stray Dogs set a model for the modern crime film, providing breadth to characters who would be forgettable in other films and packing every scene with nuance.