Kingo Gondo is a man who knows what he wants and how he wants things done. He cares about the quality of the products his company makes and refuses to cut corners for the sake of making a quick profit at the expense of their customers. He prides himself on running a factory that manufactures comfortable, durable, and stylish women’s shoes, and if the other directors of National Shoes don’t like that, well, he has a surprise in store for them.
Right up until the moment he gets a call from a man who has abducted his son and demands a large ransom, Gondo believes he’s in full control over every aspect of his life. He’s even figured out how to outmaneuver his business rivals and is about to send his flunky to the airport with a check for 50 million yen to buy the stocks he needs to wrest control of National Shoes away from them. The catch is he’s mortgaged his house and put up everything he owns as collateral, so paying the 30 million yen ransom will ruin him financially. The other catch is the kidnapper got the wrong boy – the chauffeur’s son instead of Gondo’s – but his demands are the same. “You’re a fool to pay, but pay you must,” the kidnapper insists, but Gondo needs time to reach that conclusion himself.
This is the basic set-up of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, which was released in Japan 60 years ago. Kurosawa and his three co-writers based their screenplay on the 1959 novel King’s Ransom by Evan Hunter (writing under the pen name Ed McBain), transposing the action to Yokohama, which is seen for the first hour almost exclusively from Gondo’s large picture windows, which look down on the whole city. Conversely, many of its residents can’t help seeing his house when they look up, which is what inspires the kidnapper to target him. “You’re on a hilltop,” he says during one of his taunting phone calls. “It’s hot as hell down here. An inferno.” It’s not for nothing that the literal translation of High and Low’s Japanese title is “Heaven and Hell.”
After the kidnapping portion of the plot is wrapped up with the delivery of the ransom and return of the chauffeur’s son unharmed, Gondo recedes into the background as Kurosawa shifts into police procedural mode, recalling the 1949 crime drama Stray Dog, his third film with star Toshirō Mifune. (The one film Kurosawa made between 1948 and 1965 that didn’t feature Mifune was 1952’s Ikiru, which briefly shifted the focus back to Takashi Shimura.) As important as Mifune was to Kurosawa’s career (and vice versa), it’s telling that they only made two more films together – 1965’s Red Beard and a remake of Kurosawa’s directorial debut Sanshiro Sugata, which he wrote and produced – before parting ways.
With Mifune taking a back seat in the second part of the film, Tatsuya Nakadai’s Chief Inspector Tokura comes to the fore, coordinating the hunt for the kidnapper and the ransom money. A mainstay of Masaki Kobayashi’s social dramas and historical epics of the late ’50s and early ’60s, Nakadai (who turned 90 this past December) had memorable supporting roles opposite Mifune in Yojimbo and Sanjuro, and returned to the fold to play the leads in Kurosawa’s ’80s comebacks Kagemusha and Ran. In High and Low, he’s the chief architect of the plan to flush out the crafty criminal when the police investigation reaches a literal dead end.
Tokura’s gambit, which has the approval of his superiors (one of whom is played by Shimura) is especially unorthodox since it requires the cooperation of the press; they’ve already come out in support of Gondo, reporting on the public’s recognition of his noble sacrifice. (Of course, the public has no clue how strenuously he resisted making it.) Meanwhile, National Shoes comes in for a fair bit of criticism (one of Tokura’s colleagues goes so far as to call its executives “a bunch of assholes”), and the dignified Gondo declines to go back to work for them when they dangle a purely ornamental position to counteract the bad press. “I’m still the man I’ve always been, even more so,” he states with confidence.
As for the kidnapper, Kurosawa never makes him any more than a malevolent cipher. In the film’s final stretch, he even wears mirrored sunglasses, an ominous guise he adopts before descending into Yokohama’s drug underworld for a harrowing sequence that at times resembles a horror film. (If the eyes truly are the windows to the soul, it’s abundantly clear he has none.) High and Low may start out as a straightforward kidnapping drama, but nothing ever stays straightforward in a Kurosawa film for long. Look deep enough and you’ll find cutting social critiques (see also: 1960’s The Bad Sleep Well, his previous dive into the shark-infested business world) and characters exhibiting grace – and occasionally cowardice – under pressure.
“High and Low” is streaming on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max.
