Kurosawa's 'Stray Dog' and 'Ikiru'

Stray Dog

Ikiru

"I always felt more loneliness at being separated from my crew than I did joy of being reunited with my family," confessed Akira Kurosawa in 1982's Something Like an Autobiography, excerpted in one of two new Criterion Collection titles from the acclaimed Japanese director. (A third, The Lower Depths, one version by Kurosawa, the other by Jean Renoir, is also just out as a two-disc set.) Included in his analysis of Stray Dog (1949), this admission actually underlies Ikiru three years later. "A story about a man who only has 75 days left to live," wrote Kurosawa on a slip of paper to seed Ikiru, and in one of his favorite leading men and stock company mainstays, Takashi Shimura, the painter-turned-filmmaker etched all the terror and pathos of a bureaucrat who discovers his lifeless existence is being terminated by stomach cancer. Told in halves, like the electrifying Drunken Angel before it and the sweltering High and Low a decade later – Shimura dies midway through the film – Ikiru ("To Live") puts more stock in work than family, in Kurosawa's typically grim yet humanistic fashion. Stray Dog, the third of his 16 films with Toshiro Mifune (starting with Drunken Angel), extends this idea that a man defines himself by what he does. When Mifune's police revolver is stolen, the young detective must come to grips with the moral implications of the havoc wreaked by his weapon. Shimura, whose leading-man status Mifune basically usurped, is wry and wise as his veteran partner. Both DVDs include making-of featurettes, while Ikiru fills out a second disc with an 80-minute documentary on Kurosawa. Biographer Stephen Prince provides meticulous commentary on each film, comparing them to Italian neorealism of the same period, in that Kurosawa was as influenced by postwar conditions as this pair of classics was informed by them.