The First Buddy Cop Movie Was A Japanese Classic From The 1940s
Before Lethal Weapon, 48 Hrs., Freebie and the Bean, and even In the Heat of the Night came along, Akira Kurosawa laid the groundwork for the now-familiar “buddy cop” genre with his 1949 classic Stray Dog. The argument could be made that no one has influenced modern Hollywood filmmaking more than Kurosawa. With The Hidden Fortress, he laid out the template for Star Wars. With Seven Samurai, he laid out the template for team-up action movies like The Magnificent Seven and The Expendables. With Yojimbo, he laid out the template for lone-wolf antiheroes like John Wick, Snake Plissken, and the Man with No Name. And with Stray Dog, he laid out the template for the “buddy cop” subgenre.
One of the first Japanese detective films, Stray Dog is also considered to be a crucial precursor to the police procedural. The film’s gritty tone and cynical outlook on the difference between good and evil evoked the somber contemporary mood of post-war Japan. As the first movie to pair up two detectives with very different goals and personalities for the purpose of solving a tough-to-crack case, Stray Dog originated many of the tropes now associated with the “buddy cop” genre.
Star Wars Is A Loose Remake Of This Japanese Classic
Shane Black’s “buddy cop” classics tend to take place during the festive season of Christmas, but Stray Dog is set in the midst of a blistering heatwave. Much like in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, the heat makes everyone a lot more hostile. A young, inexperienced cop has his gun stolen from its holster while he’s riding the bus to work. When the stolen gun’s journey through the illicit arms market ends up drawing him into a larger criminal conspiracy, he teams up with an older, wiser, more experienced detective to get
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