Once Upon a Time in Tokyo: Stray Dog (Dir Akira Kurosawa, 2h2m, 1949)
Few cities capture the cinematic imagination like Tokyo. London? Of course. Rome? We did that two years ago. New York? Inevitably. One does not need to stoop to the old tourist stereotype of the ultramodern, the futuristic meeting the ancient and deeply traditional, to understand why Japan's capital fascinates the Western imagination, as much as fuels the Japanese one. Tokyo is infinite: a battleground, a playground, a deeply divided city and a united one, a city destroyed countless times by its most beloved cinematic creation, Godzilla, and rejuvenated by the next time he, and his foes come rampaging to town. Over the next four weeks, we will visit four views of Tokyo on film; two Japanese, by arguably its greatest directors, and two international, exploring the foreign fascination with the city from afar. We begin with Akira Kurosawa and the story of a gun, in Stray Dog . This would be Kurosawa's second noir, following the superb, and socially-driven Drunken Angel. Stray D...
