1949 Japanese noir from Akira Kurosawa. Detective, former soldier Murakami (Toshiro Mifune) has his pocket picked on a bus during a brutally hot drought in immediate post-war Japan. His gun is stolen and he frantically sets out to retrieve it. He becomes increasingly despairing as the gun figures in several violent crimes. He teams up with an older, experienced detective Sato (Takashi Shimura) and they methodically set about retrieving the gun and stopping the crime spree by a stray dog turned mad dog. This is a remarkable tour through post-war Tokyo with it crowded poverty and its fetish for baseball. It is a discussion of responsibility for ones choices and the things that just happen to folks in life. It is a very rich and thoughtful film filled with Kurosawa’s usual bits of weird, mood-breaking humor. When he spends some time at a baseball game, you feel like you’ve seen the whole game and want to move on. Quite brilliant. You can see Eisenstein’s influence and the power of noir!. Even the harmonica music is fascinating. Glad I saw this one