High and Low

High and Low was directed by Akira Kurosawa at the height of his cinematic and human maturity (he was 53 years old), thirteen years after his first major international success (Rashomon, 1950, awarded at Venice the following year) and after a decade of highly acclaimed works. The film achieved considerable commercial success and is, among the director’s works, certainly one of the finest examples of what has often been understood as a form of hybridity between Western and Japanese cinematic traditions — one of the reasons why Kurosawa was so warmly received in Hollywood and in Europe.

At first glance, the film seems to fall somewhere between the classic crime film and film noir. It nonetheless displays a rather unusual structure, akin to that of a stage play, organised into three acts. The first occupies more than a third of the film’s running time and takes place in the intensely lit living room of the family home of the businessman Kingo Gondō, who is being blackmailed by someone who has kidnapped a child initially believed to be Gondō’s son but who turns out to be the son of his chauffeur. At this stage, the story clearly centres on the character of the wealthy businessman, portrayed by the extraordinary Toshiro Mifune (1920–1997), who is irresistibly capable of commanding the viewer’s attention. Mifune, widely regarded as one of the greatest actors of the last century on an international scale — and certainly the most acclaimed of Japanese actors up to the 1970s — delivers here, far removed from the samurai and military figures he was made to embody by Kurosawa and Hollywood alike, one of the most convincing performances of his career: that of an authoritarian employer who has risen by sheer effort, a kind of masculine embodiment of the new, modern, post-war Japan.

In the following two acts, Gondō relinquishes his central position in the narrative, making way for a group of young police inspectors — most notably Tatsuya Nakadai (1932–2025), another of Kurosawa’s preferred actors, impeccable as the lead inspector, patient, restrained and methodical — who take charge of the action as it develops into a classic police procedural. In the shorter third act, the film acquires an even stronger noir inflection, taking on the qualities of a psychological thriller set in the urban environment of Tokyo (in fact Yokohama, where the exterior scenes were shot), in which the character played by the kidnapper comes to the fore. It is then Tsutomu Yamazaki (1936– ), the film’s third great actor, who shines in a manner markedly different from the other two, convincinglyarticulating the full complexity that Kurosawa adds to the original character from McBain’s novel. Yamazaki, who at the age of 27 was working with Kurosawa for the first time and would later be cast again in Red Beard (1965) and Kagemusha (1980), two of the director’s most emblematic films, adopts here a register that curiously brings him close to Zbigniew Cybulski, the actor-fetish of the Polish director Andrzej Wajda, known for portraying difficult characters such as the one he played in Ashes and Diamonds (1958), very much in keeping with the spirit of the period. As is often the case in Kurosawa’s cinema, High and Low is a markedly masculine film, in which women occupy entirely peripheral roles in relation to the central narrative, even though the director could rely on two great actresses — Kyōko Kagawa and Kin Sugai — to whom he nevertheless affords little depth.

High and Low is, as the director himself preferred, a screen adaptation of a literary text, with a screenplay co-written by Kurosawa. While he found in Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great nineteenth-century Russian novelist, his preferred source of inspiration for most of his cinematic adaptations of major literary works, the crime novel he chose to adapt in High and Low (King’s Ransom: An 87th Precinct Mystery) is of a completely different nature, and of incomparably lesser literary stature. It was published in 1959 by Ed McBain, a relatively unremarkable American crime writer, and Kurosawa appears to have been interested above all in the moral dilemma faced by a wealthy businessman who must choose between the ambition that defines him and the saving of a kidnapped child’s life. Kurosawa nonetheless chooses to introduce a class dimension into the confrontation between the kidnapper, the wealthy man being blackmailed and several of the characters who surround him — an element absent from the original novel. Critics of the Japanese director’s work and film historians have persistently sought to identify in High and Low a critique of the new capitalism of post-war Japan. I acknowledge that the film’s final scene, which brings together the kidnapper (Yamazaki) and the businessman (Mifune), by then morally redeemed, is highly demanding from a dramatic point of view and would seem to support such a reading; yet this interpretation does not strike me as entirely convincing. At most, the director chooses to place in the mouth of Gondō’s wife a warning that is once again moral rather than social in nature: that “there is no point in pursuing success if it means losing one’s humanity”. In short, Kurosawa seems to me far more interested in resolving a moral dilemma than in documenting the class contrasts of urban Japan in the 1960s.