Stray Dog

Stray Dog (野良犬, 1949) is a crime thriller from Akira Kurosawa that you can watch online on iFILM, starring Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura. Shot in the sweltering ruins of postwar Tokyo, the film runs 122 minutes and remains one of the tightest police procedurals ever made.

Young detective Murakami has his service pistol lifted by a pickpocket on a crowded bus. Before he can report it, the gun has already been used in a shooting. Then another. Each body sharpens the guilt that Murakami carries — the weapon is his, so the deaths feel like his too. He goes undercover through black markets and slum districts, tracing the gun's path through a city still raw from defeat. The man who has it turns out to be a fellow veteran. The same war, the same poverty — and the two of them ended up on opposite sides of the law.

Kurosawa built this as a social document as much as a thriller, asking how thin the line is between a cop and the criminal he chases when both started in the same wreckage. The Mifune–Shimura partnership here is the template for everything they did together afterward. Stream Stray Dog (1949) online on iFILM.