Akira Kurosawa’s (1910-1998)

HIGH AND LOW

(HEAVEN AND HELL)

1963

Starring Toshiro Mifune (Kingo Gondo), Kyoko Kagawa (Mrs. Gondo), Tatsuya Nakadai (Detective Lieutenant), Takashi Shimura (Chief of Detectives)

Music composed by Masauro Sato

 

High and Low is based on Ed McBain's early 87th Precinct novel King's Ransom.  The book is one of an extremely long and popular series of police procedurals.  Although the screenplay transplants the story to Japan and significantly enlarges on the action, many scenes are very faithfully lifted from the source novel.  In the novel, there are three kidnappers who are all well-developed characters; in the film, only one is well-developed, though he has two accomplices.

 

Kurosawa demonstrates individuals can transcend chaos, moral confusion, and decadence of the societies they live in through making correct moral choices.  His stories are typically set in the civil wars of medieval Japan or in modern Japan under U.S. occupation and postwar reconstruction.

 

Plot Synopsis

Kingo Gondo, chief operating officer of National Shoes, is presented a proposal by three other vice presidents.  Together they will take over the firm by ousting the president.  Gondo dislikes the clique's emphasis on style over quality and refuses to cooperate.  After the other vice presidents leave, Gondo reveals to his wife and his assistant that he has secretly acquired more stock in National Shoes than any of his rivals realize, and that he is about to acquire more.  The new stock purchase will give him majority control, though he has to mortgage his luxurious house on a hill overlooking Yokohama. 

 

Gondo suddenly receives a phone call from an individual claiming he has kidnapped Gondo's son.  It turns out the kidnapper mistakenly took the son of Gondo's chauffer, but the kidnapper insists on the ransom anyway.  Gondo finds himself in an odd situation.  He has already borrowed enough money for either the stock purchase or the ransom, but he cannot pay both.  If he ransoms someone else's child, he will be ousted from his position at National Shoes and lose his home.  If he buys the controlling interest in National Shoes, the innocent child will die.  This moral dilemma is faithfully reproduced from the novel, but Kurosawa's version has Gondo's decision exactly the opposite of what it was in the novel, though his actions are nearly identical. 

 

The film follows the novel in emphasizing police procedure in attempting first to fool the kidnapper, and later to track him down, but unlike the novel, Kingo Gondo the extortion victim is the focus of the film.  The film's extended second half goes significantly beyond King's Ransom in developing the kidnapper as a character and exploring his motivation and choice of Gondo as his victim.  In the novel, the kidnappers' only motivation is money, whereas in the film the kidnapper is motivated by envy, class hatred, and a sense of injustice.  Kurosawa's take on this individual is that he responds to moral corruption and social degeneration by choosing to become evil.  Unlike the book, the film explores extensively the kidnapper's universe of sleazy nightclubs, poverty, and drug addiction.  Heroin addiction had rarely been depicted before in films, most notably in Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), from the novel by Nelson Algren.  Another difference between the film and its source novel is the fate of the two accomplices.  Particularly uncharacteristic for Ed McBain, is that the novel has a happy ending for the accomplices.  They fare significantly worse in the film.

 

Akira Kurosawa [1910-1998] was Japan's most highly regarded film director.  His nickname on the set was "tenno," or emperor, and he is also known as "the sensei of cinema."  He coauthored virtually all his own films, and produced a large number of highly literate screenplays filmed by other directors.  Some of his most popular screenplays have been filmed multiple times, and several of his films have been remade in English, particularly The Outrage, The Magnificent Seven, A Fist Full of Dollars, and Star Wars.

 

The Cast

Toshiro Mifune [1920-1997] (Kingo Gondo) starred in many of Kurosawa's films, including Drunken Angel (1948) as a gangster, The Quiet Duel (1949) as Takashi Shimura's son, Stray Dog (1949) as the police officer who loses his gun, the bandit in Rashomon (1950), a romantic artist in Scandal (1950), Seven Samurai (1954) as a farmer who impersonates a samurai, Record of a Living Being (I Live in Fear) (1955) as a man motivated by fear of nuclear war, The Throne of Blood (1957) as the Macbeth character, The Lower Depths (1957), The Hidden Fortress (1958) as the samurai general which inspired Han Solo in Star Wars, The Bad Sleep Well (1960) as the hero, Yojimbo (1961), and its sequel Sanjuro (1962) as the character inspiring Clint Eastwood's man with no name in a series of Westerns, High and Low (1963), and Red Beard (1965).  An international star, he has been in many English-language films, including Storm over the Pacific (1960), Retreat from Kiska (1964), Grand Prix (1967), Midway (1976) as Admiral Yamamoto, and 1941 (1980).  He normally played vigorous, morally-driven heroes, but could also play complex villains, as in The Throne of Blood.  By the late fifties he had largely supplanted the older Takashi Shimura as the performer on which Kurosawa most depended.  Mifune and Kurosowa fell out during the excruciating two-year long production of Red Beard, where Mifune played the wise elder doctor role, a type often depicted by Takashi Shimura in the early fifties.  Kurosawa and Mifune never spoke again.  The great director also fired composer Masaro Sato after this film.  Kurosawa retired from filmmaking after Red Beard and attempted suicide, but recovered and made two of his finest and most spectacular films without Mifune, Kagemusha (1980) and the Shakespearean Ran (1985), based on King Lear, as well as the more intimate Dreams (1990) and Rhapsody in August (1991) with Richard Gere.  Kagemusha in particular proved to be nearly as troublesome for Kurosawa as Red Beard.  Though production was not unduly extended, the director was forced to replace his lead performer with Tatsuya Nakadai on the first day of shooting.

 

Kyoko Kagawa [1931-] (Mrs. Gondo) starred for Kurosawa in The Bad Sleep Well and Red Beard.  In Red Beard, a dramatic tour de force, she plays "the mantis," a neurotic serial killer.  She is perhaps best known for her starring role as the newspaper photographer in Ishiro Honda's Mothra (1961), which was the most expensive film in the history of Japanese cinema until it was eclipsed by Red Beard.

 

Tatsuya Nakadai [1932-] (Detective Lieutenant) played the villains in both Yojimbo and Sanjuro, Kurosawa's two most popular films.  He was tapped to replace Shintaro Katsu as the lead in Kagemusha (1980), and finished his distinguished career as Lord Hidetora Ichimongi in Ran (1985).

 

Takashi Shimura [1905-1982] (Chief of Detectives), one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century, starred in Kurosawa's The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945) (remade first by Kurosawa as The Hidden Fortress, and later by George Lucas as Star Wars), Those Who Make Tomorrow (1946), No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), Drunken Angel (1948) as a doctor who tries to reform yakuza Toshiro Mifune, The Quiet Duel (1949), Stray Dog (1949) as Mifune's boss, Rashomon (1950) as the woodcutter, Scandal (1950) as Mifune's lawyer, The Idiot (1951) from the novel by Fyodor Dosoevsky, Ikiru (1952), his lifetime performance, as the bureaucrat dying of stomach cancer, Seven Samurai (1954) as the head samurai, Record of a Living Being (1955), The Throne of Blood (1957) as the character corresponding to Macduff, The Hidden Fortress (1958), The Bad Sleep Well (1960) as the second villain, Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962), High and Low (1963), Red Beard (1965), and finally, in Kagemusha (1980).  A Toho contract actor, Rashomon was one of his few films for another studio and he notably starred as Dr Yamane the paleontologist in Godzilla (1954) and Godzilla's Counterattack (1955), as well as appearing in The Mysterians (Earth Defense Forces) (1957), Mothra (1961), Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster (1964), and most kaiju eigan films until his death.  He also had a small role as a priest in Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964), based on short stories by Lafcadio Hearn.  Shimura’s characters are generally the moral center of the Kurosawan universe, often providing guidance to the less experienced character played by Mifune.  After 1957, when Shimura played a supporting role in The Throne of Blood, a retelling of Macbeth, his parts became increasingly brief but continued to be highly memorable.