HIGH & LOW Movie Review

Tengoku To Jigoku

Akira Kurosawa's dense, crackling thriller is based on King's Ransom, an 87th Precinct novel by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter). In Kurosawa's version, a high-powered shoe tycoon (Toshiro Mifune) is interrupted during a business meeting with the news that his son has been kidnapped. After agreeing in front of associates that he will pay the enormous ransom demanded (money he recently raised for a pending business deal by mortgaging everything he owns), the boy walks in the house. It seems that the kidnappers have taken the son of Mifune's chauffeur by mistake, and now the ruthless businessman must decide if he's willing to risk everything to save a child who is not his own. High & Low is neatly divided into two sections; the first half (entirely set in the tycoon's luxurious, high-rise home overlooking Tokyo) deals with the difficult decision that Mifune has to make, while the second half (set in the “lower” depths of the city's dark, labyrinthine streets) deals with the pursuit of the kidnapper and the aftermath of his arrest. High & Low provides the physical tension and gut-level excitement one expects from a detective thriller, but also provides what one has come to expect from Kurosawa: a story that resonates in surprising and universal ways for all of us who would separate actions from consequences. A visual knockout, but be sure you look at a letterboxed copy. (And you're not going crazy—there is one color image in this otherwise black-and-white film.)

NEXT STOP … Stray Dog, The Bad Sleep Well, Face/Off

1962 (R) 143m/B JP Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Mihashi, Tatsuya Nakadai; D:Akira Kurosawa; W:Evan Hunter, Riyuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Akira Kurosawa; C:Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saito; M:Masaru Sato. VHS, LV, Letterbox IME, TPV