Masterful Movie

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

HIGH AND LOW is a mysterious crime drama about an ambitious director of the company for the manufacture of footwear, who becomes the target of a madman. The film is loosely based on the 1959 novel "King's Ransom" by Ed McBain. This is a story about morality and character, in which the crime is reconstructed to the smallest detail.Mr Gondo is a wealthy industrialist who is contacted by a gang of kidnappers, who inform him that they've kidnapped his son. The crooks demand a huge ransom for the boy's return. However, They have, by mistake, kidnapped son of his driver. The moral and character of Mr. Gondo come into question...Mr. Kurosawa has put a huge moral dilemma for the main protagonist in this film. He has managed to show the two faces of a rich man, through an excellent direction, a constant questioning of character and a thorough investigation of the crime.The excellent topics is simply connected to each other. The story moves from a complex and anxious melodrama into a good detective thriller. The reconstruction of the crime is almost perfect, and Mr. Kurosawa takes us through frequent streets and remote locations. The scenery is a very good characterization is, as usual, almost perfect.Toshiro Mifune as Kingo Gondo is a man whose life plan has collapsed in one minute. He is forced to make difficult decisions. His moral and character nuances come to the fore in those moments. Mr. Mifune has offered a very convincing performance. Tatsuya Nakadai (Chief Detective Tokura) has almost managed to steal the show, as a capable, persistent and helpful detective. Kyōko Kagawa as Reiko Gondo is, above all, a mother and her performance corresponds to that fact. Tsutomu Yamazaki as Ginjirô Takeuchi is the main kidnapper. The envy and hatred are the drivers of his madness.This is a tense detective thriller and a good overview of film noir too.

In Akira Kurosawa's HIGH AND LOW, a drawn-out, monochromatic (save one key scene with the lurid smoke) contemporary crime drama clocks in at 2 hours and 23 minutes, the story can be roughly divided into two parts, in the first half, Kurosawa forcibly broaches an existentialist moral conundrum to Kingo Gondo (Mifune, not unexpectedly brings forth the urgency and telling ambivalence to the fore), an executive of a major shoe company called National Shoes, just when he is ready to implement his clandestine leveraged buyout plan to gain control of the company against his rebarbative and avaricious fellow members of the board, who manifestly advocate manufacturing shoddy shoes in order to lower the cost and bring more financial gain, he receives an extortion call which claims that his son is being kidnapped, and he must pay a colossus amount of money in cash, which basically is all his saving including the mortgaged capitals for the buyout. But subsequently, it transpires that the kidnapper has mistakenly kidnapped the son of his chauffeur Aoki (Sada), instead of his son, so he immediately seeks the assistance of the police force, lead by detective Tokura (Nakadai, charismatic, naturalistic and occasionally amusing), and believes that the abductor will release the kid after realizing his mistake. Nevertheless, the abductor perversely insists that the extortion is still on, and hangs Kingo out to dry: will he be willing to pay the ransom to save a kid whom he is not related? Especially, when the outcome will strip him of his position in the company, all the savings and put the family in heavy debt. Kurosawa beautifully orchestrates a nexus of theatrical tableaux vivants inside his hill-top residence perfectly in line with film's wide-screen capacity, to accentuate Kingo's testing oscillation: Aoki pleads abjectly to save his son, Kingo's wife Reiko (Kagawa) also takes Aoki's side, urges him to pay the ransom since she thinks they are completely responsible for the kidnap, but Kingo obdurately refuses to compromise, until the next morning, a sudden epiphany precipitates him to make the right decision and then the story swerves briskly into the action of delivering the ransom, neatly fashioned with an ingenious wheeze on a moving train to make the transaction. After that point, the film slowly shifts its focus from the Gondos to a forensic exposition of police procedural to track down the perpetrators, led by Tokura and his subordinates: detective Arai (Kimura) and Bos'n' (Ishiyama). The devil is always in the details, and it needs strenuous collective endeavor to spot it, Kurosawa doesn't flinch from laying out all the circumstantial steps of the investigation in front of audience, interlaced with extensive cutaways to explicate the process, it is amazingly engrossing because you are also in tandem investing yourself into combing through minute information and threads, without any narrative elision to spoil the fun, a feat rarely maneuvered with such scope of realism in films, neither before nor after. Before long, two dead accomplices are discovered and the film decisively discards its whodunit myth, then unexpectedly weaves a shrewd scheme into the plot, to inveigle the culprit to aggravate his wrongdoings (a trenchant point that extortion is under-punished in Japan's penal system), also entering the picture is the leverage of public opinion and collaboration with media, the latter flouts its wonted negative standing and for once, functions as an entity with conscience and flexibility.Finally, en route to the belated arrest, HIGH AND LOW takes a detour firstly into a nightclub mixed with foreigners and locals, then to the startling home-turf of drug addicts (peppered with strangely wry sketches of plainclothes trying to mingle with the zombie-alike, against a very impressionist setting), where it touches the lowest ground as an astute social commentary shedding lights on both polarities, "Heaven and Hell", the literal translation of its Japanese title.The film ends with a heightened juxtaposition of Kingo and the perturbed kidnapper in the prison, a mirrored vis-à-vis communication between the high and the low, then the film divulges the motive behind the crime: hatred springing from the disproportionate gap between rich and poor, but Kurosawa is too savvy to flog the dead horse, so in his usual flourish, he leaves the revelation at once surprising and rationalized, well done, again, maestro!

One of the all-time-great "procedurals," High and Low is a combination of immensely powerful psychodrama and exquisitely detailed police procedural - a movie that illuminates its world with a wholeness and complexity you rarely see in film. The images populate the widescreen frame like a pressure cooker that is ready to blow up. And in High and Low, blow up they do!The opening action is entirely set in Gondo's claustrophobic luxurious house, high up in the hill above the city, overlooking its industrial slums. High and Low tells the story of powerhouse shoe executive Kingo Gondo (Toshirô Mifune) battling the greedy board of directors to see what direction the company is going, as he resists their scheme to make a shoddy shoe to buildup profits. On the eve of pulling off the big coup of taking over the company-a proposition that throws him in hock down to his own furniture, he's hit by a huge ransom demand, with a twist -- the kidnapper mistakenly takes, not his own son, but his chauffeur's. Paying the ransom will ruin him financially; not paying it will ruin him as a human being. As Gondo struggles with his dilemma, the movie acquires an almost allegorical profundity, while Gondo is forced to decide between the life of an innocent and fealty to an abstract code. The second half of the film changes moods considerably, as it moves outdoors into the bustling and tawdry metropolitan area and becomes a police procedural film; it becomes nail-biting as it follows through on the money exchange and the manhunt for the kidnappers. As Gondo, Mifune sheds his samurai garb to play the modern-day millionaire in a suit and tie and conveys all the terrible rage of his ambition as well as the indestructible germ of compassion that lives inside him with remarkable effortlessness. But the real hero of the movie is Akira Kurosawa, who weaves together character study, social commentary and police procedure and combines what might have been a whole series of movies for another, lesser director. Nothing compares to the experience of watching a movie where every scene, every sequence, every shot are alive with confidence in the medium. Your complaints with Kurosawa (if any) would dissolve in the backwash of pure film pleasure High and Low offers, as you're introduced once again to the master.

An executive of a shoe company (Toshiro Mifune) becomes a victim of extortion when his chauffeur's son is kidnapped and held for ransom.The first thing to notice is the interesting screen dimensions (which are handy for subtitles). Few films seem to have such a wide screen and narrow top-to-bottom height.The film is loosely based on "King's Ransom" (1959), by Ed McBain. Others see different influences. The Washington Post wrote of the film, "High and Low is, in a way, the companion piece to Throne of Blood—it's Macbeth, if Macbeth had married better. The movie shares the rigors of Shakespeare's construction, the symbolic and historical sweep, the pacing that makes the story expand organically in the mind." No matter what you see, this is definitely a strong addition to Kurosawa's resume, and a great police procedural that deserves more praise than it seems to get.