High and Low (Kurosawa) and Stray Dog (Kurosawa) BFI Blu Ray 2025
Crime films with a tinge of film noir are not the obvious genres that spring to mind when you think of the typical output of Akira Kurosawa. Putting the generally wonderful samurai period films to one side we have intimate social realist dramas like Living and I Live in Fear but the detective story? Yet Kurosawa cannily took the mechanics of the cop thriller and gave High and Low and Stray Dog his personal signature. In both of these films police procedure is methodically and fascinatingly plotted. But adjacent to the solving of the crime is Kurosawa’s sense of character, atmosphere, conflict of class distinctions and a displacement of time in pursuit of the criminal: the director of Rashomon again presents complex variants on the truth of the situation.
Stray Dog (1949) stars a very young Toshiro Mifune as Murakami who’s a rookie cop. On a trolley bus a pickpocket steals his loaded pistol. Murakami reports the theft to his superiors and is told to conduct an investigation. He is partnered with veteran detective Sato (Takashi Shimura). Together they traipse through Tokyo, during an oppressive heat wave, searching for the thief and his yakuza associates. Murakami’s gun is used to murder a woman during a robbery and he feels shame, guilt and responsibility that it’s his weapon. Contrasted with Murakami’s inexperience and anxiety is Sato’s feet on the ground coolness. When the rookie might sentimentalise about a criminal, his much older buddy remains emotionally detached. Sato says of the thief “A stray dog becomes a wild dog…then a mad dog only sees a straight path.”
Kurosawa admired Jules Dassin’s The Naked City made the previous year. That was a groundbreaking police film shot on real street locations in New York to give it a documentary look. Murakami’s long walk, to discover clues, through the seedier parts of Tokyo certainly captures a sweaty realism but unfortunately this becomes an overlong ten minute sequence that makes the film drag. And an extended scene of Sado introducing Murakami to his family feels redundant. All the best character revealing moments are when they are buddies tracking a villain at a baseball game; questioning showgirl Harumi and conferring with colleagues at the police station.
The film is a virtually plot less manhunt. Everybody is at the point of physical exhaustion and in scene after scene keeps wiping the sweat of their faces. You really feel the dreadful heat of the day. Especially when Murakami pursues Yusa the disenchanted war veteran to whom the gun has been loaned. Once the chase is over the captured Yusa and Murakami simply flop down into a field to recover from their exertions. Kurosawa lets his camera rest on the tired out players creating a marvellously human moment in Stray Dog. This and the earlier hunt scenes reveal the acute brilliance of Kurosawa’s editing. Straw Dog is an engrossing crime drama that can be claimed to be an early template for the buddy cop American films of the 70s.
High And Low (1963) is a loose adaptation of a novel by Ed McBain. It’s a kidnapping story with a twist. Again we have Toshiro Mifune now playing a shoe manufacturer called Kingo Gondo. He is a wealthy board member who is placed in a moral dilemma. At first he thinks it’s his son that has been kidnapped with a ransom placed at 30 million yen. In fact it’s the son of his chauffeur. Gondo has just borrowed a huge sum of money to gain executive control. Initially he refuses to help his employee, by handing over the money to the kidnapper, as this will financially ruin him and his family. He then changes his mind. The police are brought in to find the kidnapper and retrieve the handed over ransom.
Like Stray Dog this is also a police procedural crime drama. However the conventions accompany a searching study of class and economic conditions. Gondo’s house is set on a hill where down below is poverty. The title High and Low has been said to suggest Heaven and Hell where Gondo’s house rests at midpoint. And the story is more about an ascent and descent into these two states, breeding a social inequality, between its haves and have nots. At the end of the film this social division and anger is savagely expressed. Indeed the whole film seems to work towards a deliberate inconclusiveness – we don’t learn the kidnapper’s motivation, no neat crime film resolution here, but witness an outburst of suffering and injustice.
The film is divided into two parts or acts. The first half is set in Gondo’s apartment where the tensions and strains arising between him, his wife and the detectives are played out. This enclosed set provides an intensity that at first appears stagey, yet becomes superbly cinematic, recalling the interior nature of Hitchcock’s Rope. The room creates a powerful time and space dynamic for crucial decision making. It’s a confining character, in its own right, receiving inspired help from Kurosawa’s decision to shoot the film in black and white wide screen. Everyone is trapped yet protected from the kidnapper (curtains are drawn in case he’s watching them through his binoculars).
Once the money is handed over, executed in an exciting train episode worthy of Hitchcock, and the boy is safely returned then the action moves to the streets of Tokyo. We have exchanged the false security of Gondo’s rich heaven for the noise and bustle of everyday hell. This second half has numerous locations – a bar, with a dance space, visited by the yakuza; a dope den for heroin addicts (recalling Kurosawa’s adaptation of Gorki’s The Lower Depths); the filthy room where the kidnapper’s drug users are murdered and a crowded hospital waiting room. And of course there’s a car chase and car patrol scenes but minus the cliché shoot outs.
High and Low is much more technically sophisticated, though as emotionally raw, as Stray Dog. If Dassin was an influence on Stray Dog then the investigation procedure of Fritz Lang’s M is apparent in the police interiors of High and Low – the referring to large scale wall maps to track the kidnapper’s moves is indebted to Lang. The film’s sense of a dislocation of time and space: an operation carried out between the saved rich (who might at anytime be dammed) and the un-rescued poor (whose criminality usually dams them) are perceptively explored themes. Eighteen years, after Japan’s post war economic ‘miracle’, a bitter social downside still existed. And Kurosawa masterly juxtaposes these two irreconcilable worlds.
Both films are essential viewing. Stray Dog is good to very good Kurosawa. High and Low is one of Kurosawa’s greatest films. They are beautiful 4k restorations from the BFI with excellent notes by crime fiction expert Barry Forshaw and others.
Alan Price©2025.
High and Low (Kurosawa) and Stray Dog (Kurosawa) BFI Blu Ray 2025
Crime films with a tinge of film noir are not the obvious genres that spring to mind when you think of the typical output of Akira Kurosawa. Putting the generally wonderful samurai period films to one side we have intimate social realist dramas like Living and I Live in Fear but the detective story? Yet Kurosawa cannily took the mechanics of the cop thriller and gave High and Low and Stray Dog his personal signature. In both of these films police procedure is methodically and fascinatingly plotted. But adjacent to the solving of the crime is Kurosawa’s sense of character, atmosphere, conflict of class distinctions and a displacement of time in pursuit of the criminal: the director of Rashomon again presents complex variants on the truth of the situation.
Stray Dog (1949) stars a very young Toshiro Mifune as Murakami who’s a rookie cop. On a trolley bus a pickpocket steals his loaded pistol. Murakami reports the theft to his superiors and is told to conduct an investigation. He is partnered with veteran detective Sato (Takashi Shimura). Together they traipse through Tokyo, during an oppressive heat wave, searching for the thief and his yakuza associates. Murakami’s gun is used to murder a woman during a robbery and he feels shame, guilt and responsibility that it’s his weapon. Contrasted with Murakami’s inexperience and anxiety is Sato’s feet on the ground coolness. When the rookie might sentimentalise about a criminal, his much older buddy remains emotionally detached. Sato says of the thief “A stray dog becomes a wild dog…then a mad dog only sees a straight path.”
Kurosawa admired Jules Dassin’s The Naked City made the previous year. That was a groundbreaking police film shot on real street locations in New York to give it a documentary look. Murakami’s long walk, to discover clues, through the seedier parts of Tokyo certainly captures a sweaty realism but unfortunately this becomes an overlong ten minute sequence that makes the film drag. And an extended scene of Sado introducing Murakami to his family feels redundant. All the best character revealing moments are when they are buddies tracking a villain at a baseball game; questioning showgirl Harumi and conferring with colleagues at the police station.
The film is a virtually plot less manhunt. Everybody is at the point of physical exhaustion and in scene after scene keeps wiping the sweat of their faces. You really feel the dreadful heat of the day. Especially when Murakami pursues Yusa the disenchanted war veteran to whom the gun has been loaned. Once the chase is over the captured Yusa and Murakami simply flop down into a field to recover from their exertions. Kurosawa lets his camera rest on the tired out players creating a marvellously human moment in Stray Dog. This and the earlier hunt scenes reveal the acute brilliance of Kurosawa’s editing. Straw Dog is an engrossing crime drama that can be claimed to be an early template for the buddy cop American films of the 70s.
High And Low (1963) is a loose adaptation of a novel by Ed McBain. It’s a kidnapping story with a twist. Again we have Toshiro Mifune now playing a shoe manufacturer called Kingo Gondo. He is a wealthy board member who is placed in a moral dilemma. At first he thinks it’s his son that has been kidnapped with a ransom placed at 30 million yen. In fact it’s the son of his chauffeur. Gondo has just borrowed a huge sum of money to gain executive control. Initially he refuses to help his employee, by handing over the money to the kidnapper, as this will financially ruin him and his family. He then changes his mind. The police are brought in to find the kidnapper and retrieve the handed over ransom.
Like Stray Dog this is also a police procedural crime drama. However the conventions accompany a searching study of class and economic conditions. Gondo’s house is set on a hill where down below is poverty. The title High and Low has been said to suggest Heaven and Hell where Gondo’s house rests at midpoint. And the story is more about an ascent and descent into these two states, breeding a social inequality, between its haves and have nots. At the end of the film this social division and anger is savagely expressed. Indeed the whole film seems to work towards a deliberate inconclusiveness – we don’t learn the kidnapper’s motivation, no neat crime film resolution here, but witness an outburst of suffering and injustice.
The film is divided into two parts or acts. The first half is set in Gondo’s apartment where the tensions and strains arising between him, his wife and the detectives are played out. This enclosed set provides an intensity that at first appears stagey, yet becomes superbly cinematic, recalling the interior nature of Hitchcock’s Rope. The room creates a powerful time and space dynamic for crucial decision making. It’s a confining character, in its own right, receiving inspired help from Kurosawa’s decision to shoot the film in black and white wide screen. Everyone is trapped yet protected from the kidnapper (curtains are drawn in case he’s watching them through his binoculars).
Once the money is handed over, executed in an exciting train episode worthy of Hitchcock, and the boy is safely returned then the action moves to the streets of Tokyo. We have exchanged the false security of Gondo’s rich heaven for the noise and bustle of everyday hell. This second half has numerous locations – a bar, with a dance space, visited by the yakuza; a dope den for heroin addicts (recalling Kurosawa’s adaptation of Gorki’s The Lower Depths); the filthy room where the kidnapper’s drug users are murdered and a crowded hospital waiting room. And of course there’s a car chase and car patrol scenes but minus the cliché shoot outs.
High and Low is much more technically sophisticated, though as emotionally raw, as Stray Dog. If Dassin was an influence on Stray Dog then the investigation procedure of Fritz Lang’s M is apparent in the police interiors of High and Low – the referring to large scale wall maps to track the kidnapper’s moves is indebted to Lang. The film’s sense of a dislocation of time and space: an operation carried out between the saved rich (who might at anytime be dammed) and the un-rescued poor (whose criminality usually dams them) are perceptively explored themes. Eighteen years, after Japan’s post war economic ‘miracle’, a bitter social downside still existed. And Kurosawa masterly juxtaposes these two irreconcilable worlds.
Both films are essential viewing. Stray Dog is good to very good Kurosawa. High and Low is one of Kurosawa’s greatest films. They are beautiful 4k restorations from the BFI with excellent notes by crime fiction expert Barry Forshaw and others.
Alan Price©2025.
By Alan Price • film, year 2025 • Tags: Alan Price, film