Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
YOU WILL BE AMAZED!!, 1 Feb 2002
By A Customer
This is outstanding! A personal favourite of mine i must admit. This is a gem, but not a well known one. I've always felt that this is one of the most over looked of Kurosawa's films. WHY? i don't know, but if you get the chance, buy it or see it, you will not be sorry.
A young Mifune plays a detective that has his gun stolen from him. The quest for its retrieval is long and painful for the young detective, made even more so by the news that gun has been used in several murder cases. The hunt increases, with the final minutes of the film reaching a climactic high that is unmatched by any other film made since. The hotel and train station scene fifteen minutes before the end is a piece of cinema heaven. It is pure, pure genius.
You will enjoy!!
|
|
|
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hot action film from early Kurosawa stable, 2 Jan 2004
You can see the process that was to flower in Kurosawa's later films, taking shape here. Yes the search sequence in the film is perhaps a little too long, but the story, written by Kurosawa, is sound, and the drama leads you on. The chase scene used in this film was the inspiration behind the French Connection, and the telephone call from the hotel was adapted William Friedkin, to help illustrate Gene Hackmans charichter.The weather, is hot, and this is set up with panting dog from the very onset of the films titles. Stray Dog is a film about the difference in outlook between a calm, wise but jaded senior figure (Takashi Shimura) and his young impaitentent but more forgiving rookie (Toshiro Mifune). See this film, if for no other reason than the wonderful backdrop of post war japan.
|
|
|
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Police Procedural. Kurosawa style, 6 Jan 2006
Stray Dog gets off to a surprisingly slack start, not helped by some utterly redundant narration that repeats what we have heard in the previous scene and will see in the next. Because it’s Kurosawa, some might ascribe some higher purpose to it, but since he immediately abandons it, it seems more a lack of confidence than design. At other times he seems to be overly in love with his footage: there’s not a duff shot in the wildly overlong poverty montage of Toshiro Mifune going undercover as a vagrant, but it’s hard to justify the seven minutes given over to the scene. Yet the film gradually exerts a grip as it becomes increasingly clear that Kurosawa’s intent is not just to deliver a thriller but also a movie dealing with the effect of crime on its victims and the dehumanising effect on both those who commit it and those charged with retribution, as rookie cop Mifune takes his first steps down the road that will inevitably lead to the death of sympathy and empathy. For all his western influences (not least a music score that constantly threatens to turn into Warren and Dubin’s 'Remember My Forgotten Man' from 'Golddiggers of 1933' without ever quite going that far), Kurosawa avoids a hardboiled approach: Mifune’s experienced partner Takashi Shimura is no hardass, although his easygoing amiability disguises a lack of compassion in what has become a repetitive job without urgency: while Mifune takes every crime committed with his stolen gun on his own shoulders, Shimura brushes aside his concerns by pointing out that if the killer hadn’t used his gun “he would have used a Browning instead.” There’s a good sense of time and place, a post-war Tokyo when it was still a wooden city in the midst of a sweltering heatwave leading to a storm, and there’s a good occasional sense of detail, such as the great piece of detection at the end as Mifune eliminates the other suspects waiting at a train station. However, it does rely on a little too much contrivance at times: is it really credible that Mifune would forget not just to inform his colleagues of the killer’s location but set off without a gun? This isn’t Kurosawa at the peak of his powers by any means, but there’s definitely the sense of a filmmaker working his way up. On the plus side, the BFI's DVD boasts a good transfer but compared to the wealth of extras on the R1 Criterion disc, a few pages of text biographies and a single poster image make for a poor extras package indeed.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
![Stray Dog [1949] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41YC9F911QL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Rashomon [1950] [Special Edition] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PZsI4JyYL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Hidden Fortress [1958] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51KXEXCCSSL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![Sanjuro [1962] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51WZ01CS2KL._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
![High And Low [1963] [DVD] [1967]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Qb1c5ITSL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Toshirô Mifune
![Throne Of Blood [1957] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51THBEET5YL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Toshirô Mifune
![Ikiru [DVD] [1942]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511VGNASS4L._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Takashi Shimura
![Hidden Fortress [1958] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51KXEXCCSSL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Toshirô Mifune
![The Bad Sleep Well [1960] [DVD]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51HRCFBTCBL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
DVD ~ Toshirô Mifune
