*I posted this article on examiner.com, just to avoid accusations that I am plagiarizing. I feel that posting this article here will draw a much larger viewers.
Stray Dog (1949)
Before Rashomon, Stray Dog was Kurosawa’s first major critical and commercial hit. A hard-boiled detective tale with film noir sensibilities, Stray Dog stars Toshiro Mifune as Murakami, a green but determined homicide detective who has to retrieve his stolen Colt pistol from an unknown criminal. Murakami is joined by a wiser detective named Sato (Takashi Shimura), who acts like his good conscience, and they go on a hunt for the thief. Besides being an exciting thriller, the movie is also a stimulating commentary on postwar modern Japan, set in a suffocatingly hot summer. The montage scene, with Murakami trying to find a lead in the black market, is a tiny masterpiece (shot by Ishiro Honda, who would go on to direct Godzilla and other Toho monster movies) that shows Japan in a financial disarray in which its citizens struggle to make a living even through an illegal lifestyle, the lifestyle of a “stray dog”. As Kurosawa says, “there are no bad people, only bad environments”. Stray Dog has become influential to many directors, most notably Errol Morris and Spike Lee (the latter who effectively used the summer heat as a device to suggest frustration, tension and anger in the race-relations movie Do the Right Thing).
The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Hamlet meets film noir in this nasty, politically charged thriller that skewers corporate corruption and illegal activities at the expense of honesty and compassion. Like Hamlet, The Bad Sleep Well features a tragic hero (Toshiro Mifune), who realizes that the murder of his father was done by someone else (in this case, Vice President Iwabuchi of the Unutilized Land Development Corporation) and seeks to expose them to the public. But his attempts to combat the corporate higher-ups prove futile at the end as his heroic vengeance will lead to his downfall, proving the shocking but honest truth that the “good can falter” while the bad will continue to “sleep well” at night. Bad Sleep Well gained fame for its 20-minute opening wedding scene, which director Francis Coppola cited as an influence in the Corleone wedding sequence in The Godfather and its political corruption can be traced in Michael Corleone’s character in The Godfather Part II. The movie, like Stray Dog, is a unique oddity in Kurosawa’s body of work, one that is dominated by his samurai epics and chamber dramas.
High and Low (1963)
High and Low stars Toshiro Mifune as Gondo, a wealthy executive working at a successful shoes company who is suddenly entangled with a kidnapping plot orchestrated by a cold-blooded killer. The twist is that it is not Gondo’s son who is captured but his co-worker’s. Faced with a tough decision and an overbearing lack of time, Gondo must confess to giving the kidnapper his own money. High and Low is one of Kurosawa’s most interesting movies because it marries two styles into one: the first half of the movie is a deliberate character study of Gondo, shot with long takes and multiple camera set-ups, to suggest the tension of one man. The second half, set amongst the police procedure, becomes a riveting race-against-time thriller with fast cuts, offscreen dialogue and numerous edits to create excitement. But the movie does not exist for the sake of thrilling; High and Low is also a commentary of postwar modern Japan, in which those that are “high” are financially substantial and those that are “low” live in their lives in miserable poverty. The twist is that there are as much good men that live in “high places” as there are bad men in “low places”. Thus Kurosawa raises the question: can there truly be peace amongst all men?
All three of these movies are currently available by Criterion and are included in the illustrious AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa boxset. But to anyone who only wants three movies but already has the other Kurosawa movies, these movies are sold individually on many websites.
You might not have plagiarized per se, but you basically just copied what other generic plot synopses have said about the films. In other words, why don’t you tell us something we don’t know?
JOE L.
*I posted this article on examiner.com, just to avoid accusations that I am plagiarizing. I feel that posting this article here will draw a much larger viewers.
Stray Dog (1949)
Before Rashomon, Stray Dog was Kurosawa’s first major critical and commercial hit. A hard-boiled detective tale with film noir sensibilities, Stray Dog stars Toshiro Mifune as Murakami, a green but determined homicide detective who has to retrieve his stolen Colt pistol from an unknown criminal. Murakami is joined by a wiser detective named Sato (Takashi Shimura), who acts like his good conscience, and they go on a hunt for the thief. Besides being an exciting thriller, the movie is also a stimulating commentary on postwar modern Japan, set in a suffocatingly hot summer. The montage scene, with Murakami trying to find a lead in the black market, is a tiny masterpiece (shot by Ishiro Honda, who would go on to direct Godzilla and other Toho monster movies) that shows Japan in a financial disarray in which its citizens struggle to make a living even through an illegal lifestyle, the lifestyle of a “stray dog”. As Kurosawa says, “there are no bad people, only bad environments”. Stray Dog has become influential to many directors, most notably Errol Morris and Spike Lee (the latter who effectively used the summer heat as a device to suggest frustration, tension and anger in the race-relations movie Do the Right Thing).
The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Hamlet meets film noir in this nasty, politically charged thriller that skewers corporate corruption and illegal activities at the expense of honesty and compassion. Like Hamlet, The Bad Sleep Well features a tragic hero (Toshiro Mifune), who realizes that the murder of his father was done by someone else (in this case, Vice President Iwabuchi of the Unutilized Land Development Corporation) and seeks to expose them to the public. But his attempts to combat the corporate higher-ups prove futile at the end as his heroic vengeance will lead to his downfall, proving the shocking but honest truth that the “good can falter” while the bad will continue to “sleep well” at night. Bad Sleep Well gained fame for its 20-minute opening wedding scene, which director Francis Coppola cited as an influence in the Corleone wedding sequence in The Godfather and its political corruption can be traced in Michael Corleone’s character in The Godfather Part II. The movie, like Stray Dog, is a unique oddity in Kurosawa’s body of work, one that is dominated by his samurai epics and chamber dramas.
High and Low (1963)
High and Low stars Toshiro Mifune as Gondo, a wealthy executive working at a successful shoes company who is suddenly entangled with a kidnapping plot orchestrated by a cold-blooded killer. The twist is that it is not Gondo’s son who is captured but his co-worker’s. Faced with a tough decision and an overbearing lack of time, Gondo must confess to giving the kidnapper his own money. High and Low is one of Kurosawa’s most interesting movies because it marries two styles into one: the first half of the movie is a deliberate character study of Gondo, shot with long takes and multiple camera set-ups, to suggest the tension of one man. The second half, set amongst the police procedure, becomes a riveting race-against-time thriller with fast cuts, offscreen dialogue and numerous edits to create excitement. But the movie does not exist for the sake of thrilling; High and Low is also a commentary of postwar modern Japan, in which those that are “high” are financially substantial and those that are “low” live in their lives in miserable poverty. The twist is that there are as much good men that live in “high places” as there are bad men in “low places”. Thus Kurosawa raises the question: can there truly be peace amongst all men?
All three of these movies are currently available by Criterion and are included in the illustrious AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa boxset. But to anyone who only wants three movies but already has the other Kurosawa movies, these movies are sold individually on many websites.