High and Low (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Adam Bingham

Produced by Ryuzu Kikushima; directed by Akira Kurosawa; screenplay by Hideo Oguni, Ryûzô Kikushima, Eijirô Hisaita, and Akira Kurosawa; cinematography by Asakazu Nakai and Takao Saitô; edited by Akira Kurosawa; music by Masaru Satô; starring Toshirô Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyôko Kagawa, Tsutomu Yamazaki, and Tatsuya Mihashi. 4K UHD + Blu-ray, B&W, Japanese dialogue with English subtitles, 143 min., 1963. A Criterion Collection release.

The career of Akira Kurosawa was comprised of both historical (typically Samurai) films and contemporary dramas examining specific social issues in roughly equal measure. Moving seamlessly between Japan’s almost civil war-beset premodern past and its post-WWII devastation, the Japanese specificity of his work has often been overlooked, perhaps in part because of its global appeal, acclaim, and influence and, arguably more significant, its often similarly international provenance. Always an avid reader and connoisseur of world literature, the director was as apt to rework Dostoevsky (The Idiot, 1951), Maxim Gorky (The Lower Depths, 1956), or Shakespeare (Throne of Blood, 1957, The Bad Sleep Well, 1960, and Ran, 1985) as he was to adapt his own country’s literary or theatrical canon. In this he was by no means above or averse to mainstream genre material. Here, too, Kurosawa often looked to the West. His 1950 crime thriller Stray Dog is based on a novel by Georges Simenon, and in 1963 another such adaptation became a significant domestic hit, directly affected official political policy in Japan, and has come to be regarded internationally as one of his greatest films.

This work, High and Low, was drawn (freely and liberally) from American crime writer Ed McBain’s 1959 potboiler King’s Ransom, part of his “87th Precinct” series of detective novels. Its story of a wealthy businessman, a shoe company executive director named Kingo Gondo (Toshirô Mifune) forced to choose between his livelihood and professional ambitions and the life of the kidnapped child of his meek chauffeur (taken by mistake in place of his own son) provides a serious moral dilemma, one that the script probes in minute detail. His wife (Kyoko Kagawa) becomes the voice of humanity and believes he will pay, while his business secretary Kawanishi (Tatsuya Mihashi) represents the opposite position. He advises against payment, cautioning that his life, livelihood, and both immediate and long-term professional standing will be adversely affected.

In between these opposing poles are the police. Led by the sympathetic Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai), they provide a reasoned, if caustic, understanding of Gondo’s motives even if they fall short of encouraging payment of the ransom. Tokura holds firm to the belief that paying the money would be the best course of action, but he understands what is at stake for the protagonist and thus offers a correlative to Gondo’s own dilemma that effectively humanizes an otherwise potentially token presence.

Gondo thus does not quite have demons and angels on either side of him, but the heaven and hell of the literal Japanese title (tengoku to jigoku) is visualized in a way that accrues thematic significance. It relates to the perception on the part of the kidnapper, Ginjirô Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki), that Gondo, whose house looks down on the city from on high, lives in the lap of luxury: a luxury that, from the slums in which he lives and works, looks heavenly. His dwelling is too hot in summer and too cold in winter, and his belief that Gondo has a life that mocks his own spurs his crime. The hell in which he lives is presented not only through his filthy living conditions but also through his desperate, drug-addicted accomplices and the drug dens that are frequented as part of the film’s expansive second half when the investigation into the crime takes the viewer around the city of Yokohama, into the areas previously elided as we saw only its gleaming facade.

Significantly, Gondo is asked by the police to pretend to the kidnapper that he will pay the ransom, and it is this that appears to facilitate the change of heart on the part of the protagonist. It is as though he accedes to a fait accompli and in so doing plays a part already outlined and laid out for him. The sense of performance, and by extension of theater here, is a significant thematic extrapolation from what is, throughout the first half of High and Low, presented as a theatrical. Indeed, on a documentary accompanying this release, Nakadai talks of the film as a play; and with this in mind, one can posit Gondo as an actor, or more properly a performer. He is a man whose position, dilemma, actions, and attitudes remain predicated on the perceptions of those around him, what they desire of him, from him, who they understand or hope him to be; and to this end, he behaves in a way that effectively curtails any real sense of individual endeavor.

Kurosawa was not often famed for his use of widescreen cinematography but the compositions in this extended first section demonstrate a distinct flair for the form. Shooting in TohoScope (Toho Studio’s own format) the director visualizes a series of relations—familial, professional, social, class—and attendant tensions and hierarchies. One feels that André Bazin would have relished this picture since long, often static, takes place numerous characters in the extremes of the frame (both laterally and in depth) to literalize their respective standings and interpersonal relations vis-à-vis the crime and its aftermath. It also locks and binds them together in a complex web of interconnection and interdependency, one wherein individual action and agency is circumscribed within wider spheres of influence.

As noted, in the wake of handing over the ransom money—depicted in a thrilling real-time scene set (and filmed) aboard a train thundering through the countryside—the focus switches to the hunt for the kidnapper, and details the extended police search, their methods and the clues they accrue and act upon. The volte-face into a police procedural, especially one that has already established the identity of the kidnapper, Gondo’s former chauffeur, as Kurosawa does here, seems designed to negate any overt sense of narrative tension and instead to examine the wider consequences and impact of the crime. This switch makes Gondo, while still ostensibly at the heart of the narrative (the efforts at finding the criminal are all said to be in his name and undertaken to validate his sacrifice), effectively a bystander, a minor figure, someone stripped of narrative agency as he has been stripped of his social and professional standing. His chauffeur feels compelled to follow the case by pressing his son for any clues, while the police systematically chase numerous leads, which are highlighted largely in flashbacks as they gather at their headquarters to relay their efforts. These actions and investigations in effect mirror those processes whereby information is gleaned and disseminated, indeed, how stories are told. If it would be a stretch to describe High and Low as metacinematic, then Kurosawa at least directs attention to the extent to which those involved on all sides of the drama here are involved in creating narratives.

Like Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), then—which, like High and Low, was also recently remade in English—there is a bold formal complexity to the narrative here. It foregrounds point of view, subjectivity, and bias as key concepts. We remain inexorably aware that our perspective on the action is continually situated within contrasting points of view, goals, needs, and wants. Notably, the crime and its aftermath serve to puncture perceptions and prejudicial points of view on the (absent) protagonist. Gondo is given the chance to return to the ground zero of his career, to rediscover his passion for making shoes away from the complicated corporatization and bureaucracy that has both fed his wealth and his professional difficulties. The humanism and redemptive personal trajectories that are often taken to be so prevalent in Kurosawa are in this film (as in Ikiru, where the protagonist similarly must be purged of his place within a corrosive matrix of bureaucratic self-service) explored rather than extolled. The film is interested in the limitations and potential ramifications of an enshrinement of the human, and the individual. It is something that the respective American and British remakes of High and Low and Ikiru largely downplay, and, in the context of a Japan on the very cusp of its economic miracle, its import cannot be overstated.

The extra features on this 4K UHD + Blu-Ray edition, though retained from the earlier Criterion DVD release of the film, offer thorough examinations of High and Low and its director. Of note is that of Stephen Prince, author of The Warrior’s Camera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), whose wide-ranging audio commentary discusses the style, contextual social and cinematic place and significance of High and Low and its relationship to the source material. There are also interviews with Mifune (archival) and Yamazaki in which their methods and relations with Kurosawa are explored. It is a thorough examination and elucidation of a great film: a key work in its director’s oeuvre and as complete a representation of his artistry as any picture he ever made.

Adam Bingham, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, lives and works in the U.K., where he teaches film studies.

See also the author’s review of Highest 2 Lowest, the 2025 Spike Lee remake of High and Low, in the print edition of the Winter 2025 issue of Cineaste.

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