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Rank This Matchup or Comment/Reply Below
on 4/24/2012
I wonder if some would consider it an upset to choose Stray Dog over Sunset Blvd. It's a great Kurosawa noir featuring Toshiro Mifune in an almost unrecognizable straight-laced role as a young detective. It's a musing on the different directions that Japanese men's lives took after their military service in the war. There is a particularly great scene in which Takashi Shimura's character, an old detective, rejects Mifune's character's fear that he might have fallen into a life of crime instead of choosing a career as a police officer. Shimura takes the position that bad men are bad and good men are good and that putting them into the same difficult situation won't cause them to make similar moral decisions. Mifune is not so sure, and his journey causes him to come face to face with the road not taken. There's also some real footage of a Japanese baseball game circa 1949. As a historical artifact, a work of art, a treatise on free will and crime, and a hopeful-but-realistic vision of a defeated culture, I honestly believe it is even better than the rightly well-regarded Sunset Blvd.
