Stray Dog, Akira Kurosawa's ninth film—and third with his main man Toshiro Mifune—has many layers. Released in 1949, the film is at once about post-bomb Tokyo, the problematic status of World War II vets in Japan's postwar society, and the rise of American-style consumerism (jazz, baseball, flashy clothes). The form of the movie is a police procedural, and its essence is film noir. What separates the form (a police procedural) from its essence (film noir) is that the former provides the sheer pleasure of watching police work and the latter is permeated with existential philosophy.

Stray Dog's story would shock any member of the NRA: It begins with a young rookie cop, Murakami (a very young and dead-handsome Mifune), realizing that his new gun, a Colt, has been stolen. He's totally freaking out about this because a gun on the streets of the big city could easily end up in the wrong hands. His whole emotional and physical energy is dedicated to the search for this stolen gun. He goes all over Tokyo, looking up and down, this way and that. Soon the weapon is involved in a crime, and then another, and then another... The rookie almost loses his mind, and it is only the calm of his older and wiser partner, Sato (Takashi Shimura, who has the greatest lips in all of cinema), that keeps him together, keeps him going.

Sato's character has his roots in what many argue is one of the first detectives in the history of such imaginings, Sergeant Cuff, the hero of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868). Both Sato and Cuff "by indirections find directions out" (that line is somewhere in the plays by Shakespeare). What this means: chatter, light or side talk, is a part of his detection technique. Cuff can go on and on about roses, and Sato about the heat oppressing Tokyo. Sato is also a philosopher, an existentialist. For him, there is no true meaning to any criminal act. What is to be done is simply bringing criminals to justice and letting the law do its machine thing. The city is busy, the city is alive, the city has no meaning. SIFF Cinema, Feb 5—7.