Stray Dog | |
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Directed by | Akira Kurosawa |
Screenplay by |
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Produced by | Sōjirō Motoki |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Asakazu Nakai |
Edited by | Akira Kurosawa |
Music by | Fumio Hayasaka |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | Toho |
Release date |
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Running time | 122 minutes[1] |
Country | Japan |
Language | Japanese |
Stray Dog (野良犬, Nora inu) is a 1949 Japanese crime drama noir film directed and co-written by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. It was Kurosawa's second film of 1949 produced by the Film Art Association and released by Shintoho. It is also considered a detective movie (among the earliest films in that genre)[2] that explores the mood of Japan during its painful postwar recovery. The film is also considered a precursor to the contemporary police procedural and buddy cop film genres, based on its premise of pairing two cops with different personalities and motivations together on a difficult case.[3]
In addition to being a masterful precursor to the buddy cop movies and police procedurals popular today, Stray Dog is also a complex genre film that examines the plight of soldiers returning home to post-war Japan.