Nora inu (1949)

English title: Stray Dog

A rookie cop has his gun stolen from him while in a bus ride. He becomes obsessed about recovering it, and is assigned by his superior the task of catching the thief and, later on, the person who uses the weapon to commit further crimes.

Entertaining and well-filmed police procedural. The style eschews economy, the film lingering instead extensively over each episode, developing it into plenty of images, the most extreme case of this being the sequence at the baseball stadium where several shots of the game are interspersed with the actual plot scenes. This unhurriedness seems to be a characteristic feature of East Asian cinema. Many thematic threads have been noted by reviewers, but I think an especially noteworthy one is the fundamental need to oppose evil, and the realization that in order to meet that need we must curb our empathy towards perpetrators of evil to a minimum.

Rating: 60