High and Low (Japanese: 天国と地獄, Hepburn: Tengoku to Jigoku, literally "Heaven and Hell") is a 1963 Japanese police proceduralcrime film directed and edited by Akira Kurosawa and written by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Eijiro Hisaita, and Ryûzô Kikushima. The film is loosely based on the 1959 novel King's Ransom by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter). It follows the story of a board member for a Japanese company who is forced to make a decision between using a vast amount of wealth to gain executive control and helping his employee by lending him the money to free his child from kidnappers.
The film stars Toshiro Mifune as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy man who puts himself into debt in a risky bid to enact a hostile takeover of National Shoes, and Tatsuya Nakadai as Inspector Tokura, the man charged with solving the kidnapping case.
Plot
A wealthy executive named Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) is in a struggle to gain control of a company called National Shoes. One faction wants the company to make cheap, low-quality shoes for the impulse market as opposed to the sturdy and high-quality shoes currently being produced. Gondo believes that the long-term future of the company will be best served by well-made shoes with modern styling, though this plan is unpopular because it means lower profits in the short term. He has secretly set up a leveraged buyout to gain control of the company, mortgaging all he has.
Just as he is about to put his plan into action, he receives a phone call from someone claiming to have kidnapped his son, Jun. Gondo is prepared to pay the ransom, but the call is dismissed as a prank when Jun comes in from playing outside. However, Jun's playmate, Shinichi, the child of Gondo's chauffeur, is missing and the kidnappers have mistakenly abducted him instead.
In another phone call the kidnapper reveals that he has discovered his mistake but still demands the same ransom. Gondo is now forced to make a decision about whether to pay the ransom to save the child or complete the buyout. After a long night of contemplation Gondo announces that he will not pay the ransom, explaining that doing so would not only mean the loss of his position in the company, but cause him to go into debt and throw the futures of his wife and son into jeopardy. His plans are weakened when his top aide lets the "cheap shoes" faction know about the kidnapping in return for a promotion should they take over. Finally, after continuous pleading from the chauffeur and under pressure from his wife, Gondo decides to pay the ransom. Following the kidnapper's instructions, the money is put into two small briefcases and thrown out from a moving train; Shinichi is found unharmed.
Gondo is forced out of the company and his creditors demand the collateral in lieu of debt. The story is widely reported however, making Gondo a hero, while the National Shoe Company is vilified and boycotted. Meanwhile, the police eventually find the hideout where Shinichi was kept prisoner. The bodies of the kidnapper's two accomplices are found there, killed by an overdose of heroin. The police surmise that the kidnapper engineered their deaths by supplying them with uncut drugs. Further clues lead to the identity of the kidnapper, a medical intern at a nearby hospital, but there is no hard evidence linking him to the accomplices' murders.
The police lay a trap by first planting a false story in the newspapers implying that the accomplices are still alive, and then forging a note from them demanding more drugs. The kidnapper is then apprehended in the act of trying to supply another lethal dose of uncut heroin to his accomplices, after testing the strength on a drug addict who overdoses and dies. Most of the ransom money is recovered, but too late to save Gondo's property from auction. With the kidnapper facing a death sentence, he requests to see Gondo while in prison and Gondo finally meets him face to face. Gondo has gone to work for a rival shoe company, earning less money but enjoying a free hand in running it. The kidnapper at first feigns no regrets for his actions. As he reveals that envy from seeing Gondo's house on the hill every day led him to conceive of the crime, his emotions gradually gain control over him and he ends up breaking down emotionally before Gondo after finally facing his failure.
High and Low was filmed at Toho Studios and on location in Yokohama.[1] Kurosawa included cameos by many of his popular stock performers, making its star-studded cast one of the film's best-remembered highlights.[4] The film foregrounds the modern infrastructure of the economic miracle years and the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, including rapid rail lines and the proliferation of personal automobiles.[5]
Filming
Preparing for the scene wherein money is dropped through the open window of a Kodama express train the filmmakers made numerous enquiries to Japanese National Railways; unaware of the reason for their questions one official eventually asked "Who are you people?", the train was hired and the scene was shot while the train was running along the Tōkaidō Line. Reportedly the actors rehearsed the scene on-set for a week before the one take.[6] According to Teruyo Nogami, script supervisor on many of Kurosawa's films, claims that Kurosawa ordered the destruction of a private home because it was blocking the kidnapper actor's face are exaggerated. Instead a blue sheet was used to disguise alterations made to the second floor of a nearby building, a job conceived and executed just a day before filming took place.[7]
The film is shot using CinemaScope, a widescreen filming system.
Soundtrack
Scored by Masaru Satō, this was the eighth film he worked on with Akira Kurosawa, the film includes stock music from The H-Man (1958), the music of which was also produced by Satō.[8]
Release
American trailer for High and Low
Theatrical
High and Low was released in Japan on 1 March 1963.[1] The film was released by Toho International with English subtitles in the United States on 26 November 1963.[1][8]
Home media
The Criterion Collection released the film on DVD on 14 October 1998 and again with updated picture and sound quality on 22 July 2008. A Blu-Ray version was released on 26 July 2011.[9][10]
The BFI released a DVD of the film on 28 March 2005.
Reception
Box office
The film was re-released in the USA in 2002 as part of the Kurosawa & Mifune festival; a multi-title release that in total accrued $561,692.[11]
Critical response
Contemporary reviews of the film achieved a positive consensus. The New York Times declared it to be "one of the best detecting thrillers ever filmed," going on to commend the performance of Mifune and Nakadai and finally commenting, "Mr. Kurosawa has composed a remarkable movie mosaic, both spine-tingling and compassionate".[12]The Washington Post wrote that "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".[13]Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic after asking why Kurosawa wanted to make High and Low, wrote "To say all this is not, I hope, to discourage the reader from seeing this film. Very much the reverse. Two hours and twenty three minutes of fine entertainment are not a commonplace achievement. Also, from the opening frame (literally) to the last, Kurosawa never makes the smallest misstep nor permits it in anyone else".[14]
Scott Tobias of The AV Club commented on the film's split nature, seeing it as split in half between the indoor tension of negotiation at the beginning, and the race-against-time of the investigation to find the kidnapper. He praises Kurosawa for turning the "mundane follow-through of police work into the stuff of white-knuckle suspense."
David Parkinson writing for Empire in 2006 gave it four out of five stars, commenting on the film's use of "deceptive appearance" to illustrate that "all men are essentially equal and the only thing that really separates them are the choices they make in the depths of a crisis."[15]
Martin Scorsese included it on a list of "39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker."[16]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, High and Low has an approval rating of 96% based on 24 reviews, with an average score of 8/10 and an audience rating of 95%.[17] In 2009 the film was voted at No. 13 on the list of The Greatest Japanese Films of All Time by Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo.[18]
Legacy
The film is consistently ranked among Kurosawa's greater works despite failing to achieve the same level of notoreity as Rashomon or Seven Samurai.
In emphasising the lenient sentencing of Japanese kidnapping law, High and Low is said to have been partially responsible for reform of the Penal Code in 1964.[19]
Remakes
The Indian film Inkaar (1977) has been described as a Bollywood reproduction of the film.[20]
The film was adapted for Japanese TV in 2007 by Yasuo Tsuruhashi.
The story for the 2023 miniseries Full Circle was inspired by High and Low.[21]
^Amit, R. "Visions of Trans-Asian Orientalism: Indo-Japanese Cinematic Plagiarism, Misrepresentations, and Voluntary Blindness," in Japan beyond its Borders: Transnational Approaches to Film and Media (2020), edited by Marcos P. Centeno-Martín and Norimasa Morita. 317.
