High and Low (1963) – Film Review

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Cast: Toshirô Mifune, Yutaka Sada, Tatsuya Nakadai
Certificate: 12

By Sarah Morgan

Slowly, after years of never having seen any of his work (shame on me!), I am gradually educating myself in the oeuvre of Akira Kurosawa, thanks mostly to the BFI.

It’s releasing another of his lesser-known movies in a newly restored high definition edition, and it’s a title that fits in beautifully with my passion for crime movies.

High and Low stars the director’s most famous collaborator, Toshirô Mifune, as ambitious businessman Kingo Gondo. The shoe factory he runs has made him wealthy but greedy. He and his family are the ‘high’ of the title, living atop a hill overlooking the ‘lows’ of a shanty town.

“Nail-biting”

As Gondo plans to buy the shares that will give him control of the business, and get his grasping partners off his back, he receives a call from a kidnapper who claims he has taken his son and is holding him to ransom. Gondo decides to do exactly as instructed and pay the villain off – until he discovers it isn’t his child who is missing, it’s that of his chauffeur.

Initially, Gondo then backs out of the deal, knowing it will ruin him financially, but his conscience begins to get the better of him, setting in motion a nail-biting race against time to save the youngster, with help from the local police force.

That may all sound like a fairly routine crime thriller, but there’s a social aspect to the story too; Gondo (and those watching) receives a lesson in what it is to be a member of the ‘lows’ in Japan during the 1960s, as the gap between the wealthy and the poor grew, partly driven by the economic upswing created by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

“Muscular”

We might not agree with what the kidnapper does, but we get to understand why he’s done it thanks to the clever screenplay co-written by Kurosawa with Hideo Oguni, Eijiro Hisaita, and Ryuzo Kikushima; it’s a loose adaptation of the Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom.

Mifune delivers a typically muscular performance as Gondo, while another Kurosawa regular, Takeshi Kato, plays one of the detectives.

Special features include an audio commentary from Japanese film expert Jasper Sharp and an episode of the documentary series Akira Kurosawa: It is Wonderful to Create focusing on the making of the film.