High and Low (Criterion)

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): *****

Akira Kurosawa's classic High and Low is an adaptation of an Ed McBane 47th Precinct novel and it plays, on one level, just like that – a meticulous police procedural – CSI: Kurosawa, if you will.

The plot poses a neat moral dilemma – is someone else's child's life worth the same as your own child?  The movie begins with Toshiro Mifune as a shoe company executive trying to take over the company he has worked for his whole life and mold it in his own deeply honorable image. While he works at the mechanations of the hostile takeover, his chauffeur's son is kidnapped, mistaken for Mifune's.

When first sent to these shores, the film's title was mistranslated – its Japanese moniker, Tengoku to jigoku, literally means "Heaven or Hell?" Which is what Kurosawa is after here showing the bourgeois heaven of the shoe executive – a true mansion on the hill – and the seamy hell of the kidnappers' slum.  

The movie moves from furiously emotional single-set scenes to tense, elaborate set pieces that range from money-stuffed briefcases thrown out of bullet trains streaming across the Yokohama landscape to silent drug deals done in rhythm at a crowded discotheque. Though clocking in at 143 minutes, it never drags, offering several peaks before the satisfying end.

Perhaps by dint of its potboiler pedigree, High and Low might be the master's most Western-feeling film; with its sullen, mirror-shaded villain and deadly hip junkies, it still has Mifune at its center, playing what feels like nothing less than a Samurai, doing what is necessary for the honor at the core of his character.

This recently released 2-disc Criterion set includes a terrific doc on the making of High and Low as well as a revealing interview with the actor who plays the kidnapper, Tsutomu Yamazaki, giving great insight into how Kurosawa directed his actors.




Posted by cphillips at April 1, 2009 2:11 PM