High and Low

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High and Low-480P

Taking his cue from American film noir, Kurosawa gives us a painstakingly detailed detective film. Though the setup is extremely deliberate, the film really picks up with the feverish pursuit of the criminal, with some laudable acting all around. Kurosawa deftly touches upon the economic divisions within Japan at the time as well as the sociological ills (heroine) facing the youth at the time. While Kurosawa's labored pedantry sometimes works against it, this is solidly directed/acted picture and a great nod to the film noir of the 1940s and 50s. However, I would more highly recommend Kurosawa's other detective film 'Stray Dog' which I felt was slightly stronger. Score: 7/10

!!SPOILERS GALORE!! Tengoku to Jigoku ('High & Low', or more correctly, 'Heaven & Hell') is a remarkable expression of the Taoist elements of Shintoism and Zen; the concept that nothing can exist without an opposite (represented by the 'taiji', or 'yin-yang' symbol.) There are many obvious allusions to this, most notably the living conditions of Gondo and the kidnapper - Gondo, high on the hill in affluent air conditioned comfort (Heaven) and the kidnapper, deep within the heat of the city amidst drugs and squalor. 'High & Low' can also describe the significant elements that drug use plays in the film... To get too high is to get completely low (again, 'Heaven & Hell' most certainly applies.) Gondo's home is very bright and filled with windows, while the kidnapper lives in a very dark apartment, again a significant contrast. Gondo's gut-wrenching decision to pay or not pay the ransom for his chauffeur's child. To keep the money for himself would mean he would be able to take control of his company, but there would be no honor in that. There are several wonderful shots at the beginning of the film while they are trying to decide what to do where Gondo and the chauffeur are on opposite sides of the room facing away from each other, and another standout shot where the family is gathered on one side, the police gathered on the other, and Gondo is sitting in the dead center trying to decide what to do. Since there would be no honor in gaining control of the company if it meant even the risk of killing a child, he really has no choice, even though he puts it off as long as possible. Once he has made up his mind, there is no going back, even though it certainly means his ruin. The auctioneers tagging his furniture while they discuss their plans are particularly noticeable - could this be considered honorable? And yet Gondo pays no attention. The visual of Gondo mowing his own yard says more than any words. He accepts his decision totally, and all that it means. Even though the vast amount of the money is retrieved, his debt would still be greater. He certainly does not end up in a good financial state, but he ends up in an honorable one (running his own small shoe company with the values he cherished.) The actions of his fellow executives are almost as contemptible as those of the kidnapper. They are willing to take control of the company no matter what the cost, even dragging Gondo's personal assistant along with them. In the end, the 'old man' (only referred to in the film, never seen) would have retained control of his company, but the combination of the bad publicity associated with Gondo's situation and the cheap shoes the other executives were pushing to produce would almost certainly have resulted in the ultimate ruin of the company. I found the ending of the film unsettling and somewhat unsatisfying. The kidnapper essentially demands to see Gondo to simply gloat about the fact that he's not afraid of dying because he was able to ruin a rich man... and yet he ends up breaking down predictably. Gondo sits emotionless - there is no happy ending, there is only the fact that Gondo's life is going to continue and the kidnapper's is not. In the end, Gondo maintains his honor while the kidnapper is dragged out of the room in a shameful display (clearly afraid of dying despite his boasting.) The most satisfying part of the movie (for me) is how quickly they go from capturing the kidnapper to the execution of his sentence. If only that sort of swift justice was a reality, at least as an American. A wonderful film that any fan of Kurosawa or fine film noir should not miss. It is true, there are no samurai in this film, but it is still pure Akira Kurosawa.

Spoilers herein. Kurosawa is a giant, both as a film intellectual and as master visualist. But unlike Welles, he moved away from flamboyance and in this film moves into actual meditation after the fashion of Eric Rohmer. What we have is a long (by conventional standards) decomposition of a painting. Greenaway would later use this idea in `Draughtsman's Contract.' The first part of the film is the presentation of the painting: several characters in a room -- Gondo, his wife, his assistant, his driver, and several policemen who we yet know little about. This section is very technical visually with the camera composing every conceivable combination of these people in this room. This is _not_ like `Rope,' where the intent was to confine the film itself. Here we use the space as a device to frame the images, that's all. This section of the film is a complex painting like say Vermeer, but we have the luxury of seeing it in all its possibilities. Once we have exhausted these possibilities, we have a short section which triggers the decomposition of characters. The train introduces motion and extent that we live with for the remainder. Then the decomposition proper. The participants in the painting struggle with logic and clues to understand what it all means. In turn, we discover something about each of the individuals that constituted the initial tableau. There are no extraordinary people or events here and I presume that's the point. The solution to the crime is simply that someone else saw the same tableau through the windows and didn't like/understand it. The `viewing' of the film takes place on four levels: that of us the audience, that of the examining police, that of the voyeur kidnapper, and that of the `public' through the popular media. It is `Rashomon' folded into itself. This is somewhat challenging, but worth it: durable yet stylish.

In the late 50s and early 60s Kurosawa's pictures began to get increasingly pessimistic and depersonalised. High and Low pretty much represents the peak of this trend, a film noir every bit as cynical and universal in its condemnations as Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly or Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Kurosawa's style is sometimes hard to categorise, because he was always adapting it to suit the story. Here, we get very contrasting styles within the one film, which is informally divided into three "acts". The first, set in millionaire Gondo's mansion is composed in whites and lights, with few cuts or close-ups. The middle section, in which the detectives track down the kidnapper, is constructed with point-by-point technicality, and a sense of urgency with short scenes and plenty of cross-cuts. The final act is the titular "low" – a look at Tokyo's seedy underbelly, with low key lighting, agonising close-ups and awkward angles. This structure is perhaps where the problems of High and Low lie. It's occasionally uneven and doesn't flow well as a whole. The first act is the best - a tight, confined drama like Hitchcock's Rope. Kurosawa's handling of his characters' emotional turmoil is expertly choreographed in the placement of actors and cameras – for example, you often have everyone looking in opposite directions as if unable to face each other. The middle section has some good tension to it, but is a little too technical and formulaic. The final act looks great, but that is its very problem. There is so much going on – particularly in the sleazy nightclub – that you end up caught up focusing on all the background details rather than the actual plot. It's great as a kind of realist expose, but doesn't sit well in a thriller. The biggest trouble with the structure of High and Low is that we never really get to grips with any of the characters. There is no consistent hero or anti-hero, no single individual whose eyes we see the story through. The businessman played by Mifune is the closest thing we have to a protagonist, but he is all but dropped from the storyline after the first hour. There is not much depth to the detective characters. The kidnapper is a complex character but the focus on him is constantly shifting. While certain aspects of the picture seem really well thought out, others simply appear to be nothing more than Kurosawa going through familiar motions. Like his previous noir-ish thriller Stray Dog (1949) High and Low takes place during a heat wave, but this is not so fully emphasised as in the earlier picture and so has little real effect. Kurosawa returns to his theme of blurring social status (the chauffeur's boy being mistaken for Gondo's son despite their differing "values" reminds me of the disguised princess in Hidden Fortress or Mifune's wannabe-Samurai in Seven Samurai), but any emotional depth is stifled under the picture's tone of selfishness and sleaze. High and Low's score seems deliberately weird and minimalist, and perhaps just a bit too simplistic. There is great sound design though, particularly the eerie distant noises of the city as heard from Gondo's house. This is one of High and Low's best features, and its interesting to note the picture was made around the same time as Hitchcock's The Birds, which experimentally uses a sound design of bird noises in place of a musical score. Like some of Hitchcock's thrillers, High and Low is gripping when watched for the first time, but loses its appeal on repeated viewings. Kurosawa was to follow it up with Red Beard, which is heavy-handedly optimistic and humanist, perhaps to make up for the cynicism of its predecessors. Red Beard and High and Low are my two least favourite Kurosawa pictures and for me this was a real low point in his career, where his message making got in the way of his ability to tell a good story.

Perhaps I had been too well-prepared for this movie, but it was a big disappointment when I finally got a chance to view it on DVD. Let me address several aspects of the film individually (***WARNING! Spoilers Ahead!!***): PLOT: Frankly, there is very little plot. And what plot there is has very little suspense. In a nutshell, a businessman is engaged in a tricky financial transaction involving the purchase of some stock. By coincidence, a kidnapper targets his son, but mistakenly kidnaps the businessman's chauffeur's son instead. The businessman decides to use the money he had intended for the stock purchase to ransom the chauffeur's son and the boy is recovered unharmed. The rest of the movie explores how the kidnapper is identified and tracked by the police. When the kidnapper is captured (after a very lengthy surveillance), the majority of the money is returned to the businessman, but not until it is too late to do him any good and the deal falls through. However, the businessman procures another position and seems to be doing just fine at the end of the movie. MORALITY: Much has been made of the decisions the businessman makes and the burdens he has to bear. I don't get it, though. People lose out in business all the time. In fact, the businessman doesn't really seem that much worse off than he was at the beginning of the film. In fact, he almost seems happy that he will now have his own business that he can grow and make shoes the way HE wants to make them. Except for a few peripheral dead people (Kurosawa does not apparently have a lot of concern for drug addicts, either) the movie has a basically happy ending. HONOR: Sorry, don't get this. Yes, the businessman acts out of honor and a sense of decency. Wouldn't you? It's not as if he suffers very much for it when all is said and done. And the other businessmen DO act like sharks. That's what a lot of businessmen do. These guys are no different than the vast majority of businessmen around the world. I should be surprised or dismayed by their attitudes and actions? SUSPENSE: None...zero...nada. You just don't care. The police, for example, take over an hour of screen time to follow the suspected kidnapper. While it's true that the kidnapper is able to commit a murder while under surveillance, he never even seems to suspect that he might be under surveillance. He doesn't try to re-establish contact with the businessman. He doesn't try to kidnap anyone else. Heck, he doesn't even seem that concerned about what might happen to him. And as for the businessman...well, he seems pretty serene about the whole thing. In fact, the film seems to want to lead you to believe that the businessman's competitors might be behind the kidnapping, but then it quickly shows you that they are not. I was more inclined to suspect that the businessman might have some strange motive for engineering the kidnapping, but that's not the case, either. The police? Well, they find the suspect fairly quickly and then just follow him all over town. COMPOSITION/CINEMATOGRAPHY: OK, Kurosawa gets a few points here, but the staging is very obtrusive and almost yells at you, "Hey! Look where I've put the characters! They're in a symbolic physical relationship." SYMBOLISM: Let me break this gently...lawns still have to be mowed and some men like the time that it provides them to be in solitude. (***End of spoilers!***) This is NOT Ed McBain meets Kurosawa. This is Joe Friday meets William Wyler. Not recommended. Wish I could, based on Kurosawa's other fine works, but this movie is apparently too subtle for my jaded tastes.

At the beginning of this film I thought we were in for an awful long talky. Why had Kurasawa made this film? I should have waited. Just as I was ready to go and wash the dishes the film built up to one of the most gripping stories and held my attention throughout. The editing of the scene where the kidnapper buys the heroin took my breath away as I sat on the edge of the couch to watch closely. This scene ranks along with anything by Orson Welles and Sir Carol Reed. If you are partial to black and white masterpieces, see this film.

This is one of the outstanding detective films. For me, the most remarkable feature of this film is its architecture - the beginning is a long, static set piece taking place in one room. however, about a third of the way through the movie, it erupts into action, showing the resourcefulness of a largely blue collar police force tracking a lone sociopathic criminal. The film is a fascinating portrait of '60's Japan, but at the same time reveals its roots in Ed McBain's _King's Ransom_, from which it was taken. This is one of those films which doesn't seem to age after several viewings. Especially affecting are the police detectives, whose proletarian roots contrast sharply with the cold insensitivity of the powerful corporate executives. But the police find a hero in Gondo, the rebellious general manager who stakes his entire fortune to rescue his chauffeur's son. The admiration that the police detectives feel for him is one of the key emotions in the film.