Mark at Movie Masterworks has written an excellent article on Stray Dog (Nora inu). His observations on Kurosawa’s movie are well worth reading.
Before you go, however, please note that reading the essay may take roughly two hours of your time. Not because the article is so long, but because it’ll make you want to watch the film again.
Edit: As kindly pointed out by Mark below, the essay was actually not written by him, but Gary Morris at Images: a Journal of Film and Popular Culture. Nevertheless, thanks to Mark for bringing the article to my attention via his blog. 🙂
Thank you for your comment about Stay Dog, Vili. I don’t deserve credit for your praise, however. The essay was written by Gary Morris at http://imagesjournal.com/2004/reviews/straydog/. I gave credit to Gary at the end of the essay. I am very sorry for the confusion.
I am a big Kurosawa fan though I haven’t seen all his films yet. I’ll add your blog to my favorites so I can get some recommendations. I was thinking about getting “The Idiot” from Netflix but some of the reviews said it was not worth it because the studio edited Kurosawa’s, much longer, original version of the film. About the baseball footage, as a Chicago Cubs fan it was of great interest to me because it seemed baseball in Japan in 1949 was bigger than in the United States. Wrigley Field only has a capacity of 39,000 but in “Stray Dog” the baseball stadium held 50,000 people!