Film Forum

Japan, 1949
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay Akira Kurosawa, Ryûzô Kikushima
Starring Toshirō Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Awaji
Cinematography by Asakazu Nakai
Approx. 122 min. 4K DCP.

While a rubble-strewn Tokyo swelters through a torrid heat wave, awkward young white-suited detective Mifune finds to his shame that his pistol has been stolen — and that it’s been used in a murder. Thus begins his obsessive, guilt-ridden search, highlighted by a nearly 10-minute sequence shot by hidden camera in the city’s toughest black market. Kurosawa adapted his own unpublished novel for this, the beginning of the genre in Japan.

Reviews

“One of the greatest detective films ever made!”
– The New York Times

“Perhaps the best detective picture ever made in Japan!”
– Donald Richie

“A neorealist cop movie!”
– Terrence Rafferty

“Mifune is magnetic as a Tokyo cop obsessed with recovering his gun, but the real star is the city itself, in all its heat and squalor. The movie is an impassioned outcry against social dissolution — Kurosawa sees both Mifune and the thief who goes on a crime spree with the cop’s pilfered Colt as a product of a brutal postwar environment.”
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker

“Above all a film of atmosphere… By piling on naturalistic details to keep the heat constantly in our minds — fluttering fans, the mopping of brows, a cop hitting the back of a witnesses’ electric fan to make it oscillate between them — Kurosawa evokes a world in perpetual motion.”
– Chris Fujiwara

“A detective story that’s also meant to function as a commentary on the desperate social conditions of postwar Japan. The excitement it provides is deeper and more satisfying than simple suspense.”
– Terrence Rafferty