High and Low (1963)
[Tengoku to jigoku]directed by Akira Kurosawa
Frames in this review are taken from the Criterion DVD released in 1998.
King's Ransom
An 87th Precinct Mysteryby Ed McBain
Page numbers in the review are taken from the first Permabook paperback printing, New York: Pocket Books, 1960.
Jump to section: Technical | The Novel
Akira Kurosawa is often mentioned in film criticism as a Japanese director who was considered too Western to gain success in his own country. But Westeners familiar with his work might find this strange, for his fame in the West derives largely from his œuvres set in Medieval Japan — Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo. Some of them may be based on Shakespeare, but the themes are surely universal and the settings are unmistakably Japanese. Some of his samurai adventures were later remade into Hollywood or spaghetti westerns, but surely that cannot be blamed on him?
High and Low explains this Western bent all by itself. Although set in bustling Tokyo, the film actually feels sun-baked with the humid atmosphere of film noir Los Angeles. There are beachfront locations, remote hideaways, kidnapping plots, corporate power plays (over a company that makes high heels, no less), and even little kids playing with cowboy hats and toy revolvers! What's more, the film is based on an American crime novel, Ed McBain's King's Ransom. Adapting Shakespeare to a Japanese setting might be excused — but an American detective thriller?!
Still, the glaringly obvious American elements in the film are a bit of a decoy, perhaps even a "Come get me" tease from Kurosawa. Only half of the film is actually based on the novel. High and Low is as thorough a reworking of King's Ransom as Dersu Uzala is of Arseniev's memoirs, and the other half of the film can only be said to be generally "inspired by" film noir. More on the novel below. [Jump to section]
The film opens in the midst of corporate intrigue as businessman Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) spars with fellow executives at National Shoes. The "old man" heading the firm has been presiding over a slump in sales, and his subordinates have a plan to wow the public with stylish fashions, while cutting costs by making shoes with cardboard and glue. The schemers need Gondo's sizeable share holdings to vote the old man out, but Gondo will have nothing to do with shoddy manufacturing. He's been with the company since he was 16, and has worked his way up the ranks over thirty years. After showing the executives out the door, Gondo sets in motion his own plan to take control of the company with a leveraged buyout of outstanding shares.
But after his son Jun goes outside to play with his chauffeur's son Shinichi, Gondo's plot is interrupted by a telephone call announcing his son's kidnapping and demanding a huge ransom for his release. Already heavily leveraged, Gondo cannot afford to both pay the ransom and close the deal, but his problems are seemingly solved when Jun comes running back indoors and announces that he cannot find Shinichi. Yet this kidnapper pulls no punches, and calls again demanding the ransom anyway. Can Gondo bear to give up his career, or will he be left with blood on his hands by refusing to pay the ransom?
In a normal mystery, this would be the climax of the picture. There'd be some clever plans to nab the kidnapper when the drop is made, followed by a stakeout, some shooting, and a happy ending. But Kurosawa is not one to blindly repeat formula. In High and Low, the tension is released halfway through the film as the ransom is paid and the kid is recovered. Instead, there's a thorough investigation filled with police procedure, followed by a descent into Tokyo's underworld as they set a trap for the kidnapper and close in.
All Kurosawa films are highly structured, and High and Low is divided into three distinct parts. The first is almost entirely confined to one glass-enclosed room in Gondo's spacious hilltop house. Very reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, though without the continuous-take gimmick. In such confined quarters, the camerawork is methodical and the acting is in the forefront. Mifune is of course excellent, carrying the authority of someone used to giving orders and being obeyed, yet tormented by the impossible situation into which he has been thrust. Kyoko Kagawa is the dutiful wife Reiko, who nevertheless has a mother's compassion in insisting that her husband pay the ransom. Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) is businesslike, professional, calm in all situations, a very polished and smooth performance. Another standout performance is ironically one that frequently fades into the background: the chauffeur Aoki (Yutaka Sada) is a chess piece in a complex game, amidst sharp telephone calls, hasty wiretaps, and half a dozen policemen. Aoki only becomes noticeable when he tearfully pleads for his employer to pay his son's ransom, but even in the background he projects the sorrowful air of a defeated man: head bowed, shoulders slumped, eyes darting to and fro, with a tentative and plaintive voice.
When the first part concludes, Kurosawa rushes the heretofore stagey film into the open air as the Tokyo-Osaka bullet train wipes onto the screen with a loud blast of the horn. The onrushing scenery and the click-clack of the rails build up to a climax as the unseen kidnapper directs Gondo's actions through a railphone and foils the sting. The sequence is rather original and brings excitement into the film. The ensuing investigation is anticlimactic. Kurosawa's pace is best described as "stately." While a formalistic approach works well for the first part, with its stark moral choices and drastic consequences, it gives a slow start to an investigation which should instead work on serendipity and lucky guesses. The investigation is slightly too smooth, pieces falling into place one by one. All in all, the detectives are slower than the audience, experienced amateur sleuths from the other detective thrillers that we've watched. There is a bright lining in an otherwise unremarkable investigation, though, when Aoki takes his son out in the car to retrace his steps, while stocky Detective Bos'n Taguchi (Kenjiro Ishiyama) follows a different trail to the same destination, the house where Shinichi was held captive. Now here is the detective-work that'd been missing from the rest of the investigation, unraveling mysteries, following leads!
If part two has Kurosawa racking up strikes, part three has him hitting a home run. The police set a trap for the kidnapper, and the film takes us to the less glamorous side of bustling Tokyo. We visit noisy smoke-filled nightclubs inhabited by Americans and corrupted Japanese, eerie alleys where drug addicts wallow in misery, and a gripping encounter between the kidnapper and Gondo which the police watch with bated breath, hoping not to give away their surveillance. And the condition of the heroin addicts is truly harrowing, more dead than alive, wracked by physical deformity, one of them scraping her nails on a shack as she struggles to pull herself up. Kurosawa probably didn't win many friends in Japan by showing the seedy underbelly of Japanese society to foreigners.
But this wholly original sequence gives the film a social awareness that it couldn't have resulted if the film had followed the novel more literally. A crime committed by habitual miscreants is easily dismissed, but one committed by a hard worker clawing his way up from depravity makes a harder-hitting statement. There are more direct parallels to the chauffeur's situation and additional significance to Gondo's no-win scenario. As the kidnapper tells Gondo over the phone, he practically asked for it with his conspicuous consumption, the shiny glass house at the top of the hill. By paying ransom, Gondo would be lifting one man out of hard times and saving the life of a working man's son. Not to say that the kidnapper isn't cruel, of course — his involvement with the heroin addicts is more cruel than that of just a supplier, and it must have been even more damning in 1963 before drugs went mainstream.
Technical
Well, the DVD is not the best job that Criterion has done. This was one of their earlier DVDs (spine number 24), and it's more like a laserdisc, with interlaced non-anamorphic picture, picture flaws not cleaned digitally, and alternately too much and not enough contrast. Indoors the white shirts pop too much, and the shadows are crunched all the way to black, while outdoors the inherently high contrast was dealt with by making it a bit gray. Oh well. Dirt and scratches aren't generally a problem, except in the one splash of color in this otherwise black-and-white film, the colored smoke rising from an incinerator as the marked ransom bag is burned. This probably came from a projection print while the rest of the transfer came from better source materials.
The novel
Unlike the formalistic High and Low, King's Ransom is a hard-boiled detective story, fifth in the long-running series of 87th Precinct Mysteries. It's filled with colorful characters — detectives named Meyer Meyer, sneaky criminal elements, hapless bystanders. Oh, and voluptuous women, like Diane's (King's wife) friend Liz, who "had acquired over the years a figure which oozed S-E-X in capital letters in neon ... Even dressed for casual life in Smoke Rise ... sex dripped from her curvaceous frame in bucketfuls, tubfuls, vatfuls." (p. 21)
But however much the writing resembles that of dime-store novels, such pulp fiction doesn't usually turn into a two-dozen book series. Aside from the sex and the stereotypical New York Jewish detective (Meyer Meyer?!), there are the yearnings of the ordinary person. One of the kidnappers, Eddie, is a luckless and somewhat dim-witted habitual thief who wants nothing more out of the kidnapping than to take his girl Kathy to Mexico to live in comfort. Kathy is maternally protective of the boy Jeffrey Reynolds, she wants to tend to him, and keeps thinking of ways to extricate Eddie from the mess. And Douglas King is an unpleasant character who's clawed his way to the top, dropping rivals left and right from the storeroom to the boardroom. The police spare no sympathies for his situation, his own wife is disgusted with his refusal to pay the ransom, but his self-justifications carry a strangely compelling logic, and Liz nonjudgmentally accepts them. These are archetypes with a twist, the blonde airhead who gives off a glimmer of intelligence when reading between her lines, the sympathetic criminal, the unsympathetic hero, the scared but plucky kid.
Not having read any of the other 87th Precinct Mysteries, I cannot say how typical this one is. But King's Ransom has much to recommend it — McBain has an eye for the details, especially in the amusing discussions as characters shoot the bull, irrelevant to the plot but adding atmosphere. Descriptions of settings are picturesque and somewhat intercalary in nature — they set the scene, give a hint of future themes, and fill in the gaps. McBain's observations of characters are quirky and compelling, as they might be if he records his first impressions of someone in real life. Reynolds the chauffeur, for example, has "an almost tangible weakness ... Watching him, you felt you could reach out to touch a substance at once sticky and gelatinous." (p. 26)
King's Ransom is a fast-paced (under 200 pages), enjoyable read that raises questions in the mind. His reputation was already secure — the first four books in the 87th Precinct series went straight to paperback, but King's Ransom was first issued in hardcover. And The Times' mystery book reviewer Anthony Boucher, in his weekly "A Report on Criminals at Large" packed bushelfuls of praise for McBain into a capsule review: "Praise of a consistently admirable performer must get monotous and even boring ... The book is powerful and compelling; and one looks forward to a dramatic version that might be even more so." (The New York Times, 6 December 1959, p. BR42)
But probably a Japanese film from Kurosawa isn't what he had in mind! Boucher was remarking on the theatricality of the novel, largely set in two rooms: King's, and the kidnappers'. It's easy to picture it as a play, it's even easier to picture it as Hollywood film noir of the type whose heyday had already passed by 1959. It might be a fun stylistic exercise for a student filmmaker to attempt it as a 1940s detective thriller, actually — if one follows studio conventions, it could be done rather cheaply nowadays. Hitchcock, already past his prime, could probably have made a mediocre mystery out of it. (Interestingly, Evan Hunter, the man behind the Ed McBain pseudonym, wrote the screenplay for The Birds, released the same year).
High and Low of course picked up on the theatricality of the scene in King's house, confining Kingo Gondo inside as he faced business vultures and confronted the kidnapper over the telephone, but Eijiro Hisaita's screenplay heads in interesting directions by scrapping the parts in the criminals' hideout and substituting an original police investigation and stakeout. In some ways I like the novel better — the business deal is more authentic with its informality, the characters are more interesting with their eccentricities and a glimpse of backstory, and the resoundingly cynical view of human nature is rather refreshing. But the novel ends with the ransom delivery and a shootout.
The film is quite different; perhaps in a reflection of Japanese society, the public is unfailingly helpful to the investigation rather than a nuisance, King is a much more sympathetic character, and the policemen are less hardboiled. Yet the film introduces the heroin subplot, goes much deeper into depravity than the novel does, and makes the villain more despicable. It sets up an entirely different dynamic, removes the conflict between the criminals, adds to King's inner turmoil by giving him more of a conscience, and elevates the role of class conflict in the theme by making King an essentially good man who inspires jealousy through his ostentatiousness. And there are some profound moments, as when Gondo the executive sets to work with hand tools to repair a suitcase, drily remarking, "Starting over already" in reference to what his life would be like when he is 10 million yen poorer.
King's Ransom and High and Low together make for a nice illustration of differences in artistic interpretation. Both are good, both are perhaps not the best that they could be — King's Ransom does stick closely to pulp and High and Low is too Kurosawa for its subject matter. But both make you think while reading or watching, and that is enough to make them worth a look.
