Hardcore Kurosawa fans always debate about which of his films from the late ’40’s, early ’50’s is to be considered his first real masterpiece, when everything he’d been working on since the immediate post war, namely, a structured frame and editing scheme that perfectly balanced the social and political criticism of his story, finally came together in both an entertaining and intellectually provoking cinematic experience. Some prefer “Drunken Angel”, the 1947 drama that introduced Toshiro Mifune to Kurosawa as a petulant yakuza fighting tuberculosis, others wait for the international breakthrough of “Rashomon”, others still think it wasn’t until 1952’s structurally sound “Ikiru” that the director finally perfected that elusive goal, pure cinema, but I tend to point to “Stray Dog” as the first time when Kurosawa’s budding visual style finally totally enmeshed with his political stance to the point that little could be left to improve upon. Here Mifune is a green detective whose gun is stolen on a crowded bus in the film’s first scenes, leading to an undercover investigation of the burgeoning black market to sweat out the gun, and invariably, a scared, broke soldier using the gun for various crimes. What Kurosawa gives us is a police procedural that experiments with social criticism via documentary footage of the black markets (famous footage shot by AD Ishiro Honda, edited into a mesmerizing eight minute montage), while presenting a hero (Mifune) that so resembles the thief he’s chasing, both physically and emotionally, it suggests the slim choices offered returning vets in a depressed and desperate economy, and how easily that road home turned left than right.