Stray Dog

In Akira Kurosawa’s stylish, pulse-pounding thriller, Toshiro Mifune plays a rookie cop who has his gun pickpocketed in a crowded bus. Things get worse once he learns it's been used in a robbery and murder. As rubble-strewn, postwar Tokyo swelters in the summer heat, Mifune turns into a “mad dog,” obsessively scavenging for his lost pistol through the city's underworld. Based on a true story and adapted from Kurosawa’s own unpublished, Georges Simenon–inspired novel, Stray Dog is a frenetic noir made all the more memorable by Mifune’s fierce performance and a ten-minute-long sequence shot with a hidden camera in Tokyo's shady black market section. “Probably the best detective picture ever made in Japan.”—Donald Richie