Stray Dog (1949)

Kurosawa takes a slight and comically metaphorical story (a rookie cop is robbed of his gun during a heat wave) and plays it for melodrama, stretching the premise out for a full two hours without turning it into a huge governmental conspiracy that makes the cop the ONE MAN who can save the world. He does this mostly by taking the time to observe the period of the piece -- postwar Japan, though obviously it was "present day" when it was made. When the cop goes searching for his pistol at a street market, the establishment of the location -- which in the current Hollywood method, we'd be lucky to get in one 1.5-second shot -- becomes integrated with the plot in a five-minute montage set to a series of assumedly diegetic music cues emanating from radios. It's almost a cross between sound and silent film.

Wow, baseball was apparently alive and kicking in late '40s Japan. I wonder when it came there. Also, lol, the crowd actually gets up and stretches for the seventh inning stretch. Like those morning exercises in Gung Ho.