{"id":19772,"date":"2023-03-01T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-01T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=19772"},"modified":"2023-02-28T18:06:35","modified_gmt":"2023-03-01T02:06:35","slug":"high-and-low-kurosawa-looks-at-crime-from-the-ground-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/high-and-low-kurosawa-looks-at-crime-from-the-ground-up\/","title":{"rendered":"High and Low<\/i>: Kurosawa Looks at Crime from the Ground Up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019s shoes, and if the other directors of National Shoes don\u2019t like that, well, he has a surprise in store for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s in full control over every aspect of his life. He\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 the chauffeur\u2019s son instead of Gondo\u2019s \u2013 but his demands are the same. \u201cYou\u2019re a fool to pay, but pay you must,\u201d the kidnapper insists, but Gondo needs time to reach that conclusion himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the basic set-up of Akira Kurosawa\u2019s High and Low<\/em>, which was released in Japan 60 years ago. Kurosawa and his three co-writers based their screenplay on the 1959 novel King\u2019s Ransom<\/em> 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\u2019s large picture windows, which look down on the whole city. Conversely, many of its residents can\u2019t help seeing his house when they look up, which is what inspires the kidnapper to target him. \u201cYou\u2019re on a hilltop,\u201d he says during one of his taunting phone calls. \u201cIt\u2019s hot as hell down here. An inferno.\u201d It\u2019s not for nothing that the literal translation of High and Low<\/em>\u2019s Japanese title is \u201cHeaven and Hell.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the kidnapping portion of the plot is wrapped up with the delivery of the ransom and return of the chauffeur\u2019s son unharmed, Gondo recedes into the background as Kurosawa shifts into police procedural mode, recalling the 1949 crime drama Stray Dog<\/em><\/a>, his third film with star Toshir\u014d Mifune. (The one film Kurosawa made between 1948 and 1965 that didn\u2019t feature Mifune was 1952\u2019s Ikiru<\/em>, which briefly shifted the focus back to Takashi Shimura.) As important as Mifune was to Kurosawa\u2019s career (and vice versa), it\u2019s telling that they only made two more films together \u2013 1965\u2019s Red Beard<\/em> and a remake of Kurosawa\u2019s directorial debut Sanshiro Sugata<\/em>, which he wrote and produced \u2013 before parting ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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With Mifune taking a back seat in the second part of the film, Tatsuya Nakadai\u2019s Chief Inspector Tokura comes to the fore, coordinating the hunt for the kidnapper and the ransom money. A mainstay of Masaki Kobayashi\u2019s social dramas and historical epics of the late \u201950s and early \u201960s, Nakadai (who turned 90 this past December) had memorable supporting roles opposite Mifune in Yojimbo<\/em> and Sanjuro<\/em>, and returned to the fold to play the leads in Kurosawa\u2019s \u201980s comebacks Kagemusha<\/em> and Ran<\/em>. In High and Low<\/em>, he\u2019s the chief architect of the plan to flush out the crafty criminal when the police investigation reaches a literal dead end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tokura\u2019s 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\u2019ve already come out in support of Gondo, reporting on the public\u2019s 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\u2019s colleagues goes so far as to call its executives \u201ca bunch of assholes\u201d), and the dignified Gondo declines to go back to work for them when they dangle a purely ornamental position to counteract the bad press. \u201cI\u2019m still the man I\u2019ve always been, even more so,\u201d he states with confidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the kidnapper, Kurosawa never makes him any more than a malevolent cipher. In the film\u2019s final stretch, he even wears mirrored sunglasses, an ominous guise he adopts before descending into Yokohama\u2019s drug underworld for a harrowing sequence that at times resembles a horror film. (If the eyes truly are the windows to the soul, it\u2019s abundantly clear he has none.) High and Low<\/em> may start out as a straightforward kidnapping drama, but nothing ever stays straightforward in a Kurosawa film for long. Look deep enough and you\u2019ll find cutting social critiques (see also: 1960\u2019s The Bad Sleep Well<\/em>, his previous dive into the shark-infested business world) and characters exhibiting grace \u2013 and occasionally cowardice \u2013 under pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHigh and Low\u201d is streaming on the <\/em>Criterion Channel<\/em><\/a> and HBO Max<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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