#24 - High and Low

Wife is out of town so I was able to fit one more in - now I gotta wait for Netflix again or la Library

So Kurosawa is one of my favorite directors - I've already done my entry on Seven Samurai and what an excellent film it is, and I have at least one book on Kurosawa in my library.  However, after an aborted attempt at watching all his cinema thru from beginning to end, I gave up after the first Eclipse series and stuck to his Samurai and period pieces, as these were my favorite genres.

Of course, while I had not seen THIS film, he does do an excellent job with contemporary period material as well, including the magnificent Ikiru which I will get to later on in this blog someday.

Here we have a detective/crime flick - a kidnapping of a wealthy executive's son has occurred - except it later turns out it's his chauffeur's son - Thus begins a terrible morality tale as not only does the boy's life hang in the balance, but several other lives could be ruined if the ransom is paid.  Kurosawa takes us on this journey with two of his principle actors, Toshiro Mifune, as the executive Kingo Gondo, (what a name with Western connotations, eh?)  and Tatsuya Nakadai as the inspector in charge of the case.  Although the film runs 2 hrs and 20 minutes, it moves at a brisk pace.   As I understand it, this was based on a Western Cop novel from 1959, (the 89th precinct series called King Ransom) but of course, this is not the first time nor the last that Akira will borrow from Western sources for his material.

Some things that stick out to me - the title in Japanese is Heaven and Hell, and you get that - the executive lives high on a hill overlooking the poorer parts of Yokohama, and almost like a feudal lord, towers above them on a hill where they could virtually see into his living room.   He has servants, drivers, and a substantial share of stock in the company he is attempting to acquire.   The Hell, of course, is the lower depths of Japanese society.  One scene in particular reminded me of Night of the Living Dead, with heroin addicts standing up shakily as if to devour prey that walks inside.

There is also a club scene of Americans both Black and White dancing and partying together in a way I don't think you'd have seen in an equivalent American film in 1963, but maybe the younger generation in their Rock and Roll movies might have seen it.  I guess cause it's so rare in these early 60's films it jarred me just a tiny bit although desegregation of the Armed Forces had occurred by then.

What I also note is that Gondo, for all his executive excesses, is really a salt of the earth kind of guy - he is fighting other executives because he wants their shoes to be better quality, not cheaper - he can repair and fix things with his own toolkit, probably the only one of the executives to ever have real experience working with his hands

Gondo doesn't come across as a guy this deserves to happen to, and in the end, you don't walk away feeling the villains had some nobility or statement they were trying to make thru their suffering at the low end of society.   I have read essays where they speculate he was trying to reply to the "nihilism of the then-rising Japanese New Wave" which you would see in the Noir cinema and Seijun Suzuki a little later in the 60's.

In any case, this film is near the end of Kurosawa's principal output (the stretch from the 1950's to 1970)  - he would only do about 3 more films between this one (1963) and 1980's Kagamusha, which brought him back to international fame at the end of his career.  During this time he would suffer a career flop, a suicide attempt, and a job directing a Russian film after Japanese funding dried up for him.   In any case, it's a great modern style Japanese Detective film and a worthy entry in the Kurosawa canon

My Netflix leaves out the 2nd disk - (A headache I'm going to remedy in the future by looking for library editions again) - but there's the Kurosawa documentary "It is wonderful to create" which is with most Kurosawa films, talking about the film on the DVD - an audio commentary by Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince and some interviews with Mifune and other actors.   This is such a pretty film in 2.35 to 1 - but dont' just take my word for it - check out the trailer at criterion.com