I wish everybody who thinks owning a handgun is unqualified as a right and trivial as a responsibility would watch this film, in which Toshiro Mifune, a cop, gets his Colt stolen on a streetcar and spends the rest of the movie trying to get it back.
First it falls into the hands of an illicit gun dealer who rents it out (in return for a ration card) for a crime that a first-time criminal doesn't have the nerve to commit. When the dealer is busted and the gun fortuitously remains in the hands of the failed criminal, a robbery is committed with it, and then a robbery/murder. Turns out the criminal is of the same generation as Mifune, a veteran like Mifune, and they have simply taken different paths in the squalor and chaos (meticulously depicted) of postwar Japan.
Mifune ends up seconding a wily veteran cop on the case (Takashi Shimura, who played Mifune's doctor/mentor in the star's first film for Kurosawa, "Drunken Angel"), and a series of mounting climaxes follows. The entire story happens to take place in the middle of a cruel and universally demoralizing heat wave, punctuated at times by heavy but ineffectual rainstorms.
Has there ever been a more charismatic movie star than Mifune? First of all, he's beautiful here, in the almost gaunt style of the very early Gregory Peck, but he also has the idiomatic look of a samurai on a painted screen, his features uncannily reproducing a classical style of art, and his eyebrows arching in a way we've seen a thousand times in art but rarely in life.
And his acting is so laceratingly felt and real. This is one of those times when a sensibility profoundly Japanese (the young cop's sense of personal responsibility and shame) figures in a Kurosawa film, and yet we westerners are able to identify strongly with it -- even as Shimura and the partners' superiors act as voices of reason and experience, and tell Mifune at every turn that it's useless, no matter what the circumstances, to blame anyone but the fugitive.
The gun had seven bullets when it was stolen, and the movie makes Mifune (and us) conscious of the remaining number after each occasion the gun is used. The breathless climax of the film -- a chase and a final duel -- begins with three bullets still in the shooter's clip and Mifune unarmed.
Kurosawa makes us feel something for everybody. A hardened female pickpocket turns out to have a humane side. A gun-dealer's moll basically has the mind of a child, and Shimura is able to ingratiate himself with a judicious use of popsicles and cigarettes. The first victim (whom we never meet) is a woman whose dowry is stolen after she has waited 10 years to accumulate enough to marry. The second victim is a beautiful newlywed, whose devastated husband then smashes her tomato plants for the offense of being alive, and ripe.
And by the time we meet the shooter, we feel we know him. We never do hear him speak, but all through the last few climactic minutes we are in both his head and Mifune's. The whole movie has been spiritually and physically oppressive on all the characters, and the final sequence literally exhausts the pursuer, the pursued, and the audience. Then there comes a quiet epilogue between the two cops in a hospital room, to let us collect ourselves. What a good movie!
First it falls into the hands of an illicit gun dealer who rents it out (in return for a ration card) for a crime that a first-time criminal doesn't have the nerve to commit. When the dealer is busted and the gun fortuitously remains in the hands of the failed criminal, a robbery is committed with it, and then a robbery/murder. Turns out the criminal is of the same generation as Mifune, a veteran like Mifune, and they have simply taken different paths in the squalor and chaos (meticulously depicted) of postwar Japan.
Mifune ends up seconding a wily veteran cop on the case (Takashi Shimura, who played Mifune's doctor/mentor in the star's first film for Kurosawa, "Drunken Angel"), and a series of mounting climaxes follows. The entire story happens to take place in the middle of a cruel and universally demoralizing heat wave, punctuated at times by heavy but ineffectual rainstorms.
Has there ever been a more charismatic movie star than Mifune? First of all, he's beautiful here, in the almost gaunt style of the very early Gregory Peck, but he also has the idiomatic look of a samurai on a painted screen, his features uncannily reproducing a classical style of art, and his eyebrows arching in a way we've seen a thousand times in art but rarely in life.
And his acting is so laceratingly felt and real. This is one of those times when a sensibility profoundly Japanese (the young cop's sense of personal responsibility and shame) figures in a Kurosawa film, and yet we westerners are able to identify strongly with it -- even as Shimura and the partners' superiors act as voices of reason and experience, and tell Mifune at every turn that it's useless, no matter what the circumstances, to blame anyone but the fugitive.
The gun had seven bullets when it was stolen, and the movie makes Mifune (and us) conscious of the remaining number after each occasion the gun is used. The breathless climax of the film -- a chase and a final duel -- begins with three bullets still in the shooter's clip and Mifune unarmed.
Kurosawa makes us feel something for everybody. A hardened female pickpocket turns out to have a humane side. A gun-dealer's moll basically has the mind of a child, and Shimura is able to ingratiate himself with a judicious use of popsicles and cigarettes. The first victim (whom we never meet) is a woman whose dowry is stolen after she has waited 10 years to accumulate enough to marry. The second victim is a beautiful newlywed, whose devastated husband then smashes her tomato plants for the offense of being alive, and ripe.
And by the time we meet the shooter, we feel we know him. We never do hear him speak, but all through the last few climactic minutes we are in both his head and Mifune's. The whole movie has been spiritually and physically oppressive on all the characters, and the final sequence literally exhausts the pursuer, the pursued, and the audience. Then there comes a quiet epilogue between the two cops in a hospital room, to let us collect ourselves. What a good movie!