Cheap High and Low - Criterion Collection (DVD) (Toshirô Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yutaka Sada) (Akira Kurosawa) Price

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Customer Reviews of High and Low - Criterion Collection

An executive's (Toshiro Mifune) son is kidnapped, but when it is discovered it was his chauffeur's son taken by mistake and the kidnapper threatens to kill him anyway if ransom isn't paid, the executive, who is embroiled in a power struggle within his corporation and needs all the money the kidnapper demands or face ruin, is truly stuck on the proverbial horns.

The first half of the film takes place in the executive's living room, and is a character study and a commentary on corporate greed and back-stabbing and where and to whom one's allegiance and loyalty belongs. Mifune's Gondo has hard choices to make and ruin of one kind or another lies at the end of either choice.

The second half of the film is a police procedural detailing the meticulous efforts to track down the kidnapper(s). I did not know this film was based on an Ed McBain 87th Precinct Novel until after I had seen it, but this latter part is classic policework McBain-style. Unfortunately, the police characters & personalities cannot be fully defined and detailed as in the 87th Precinct, but we come to get a sense of some of them. And the police work is spot-on. I love the 87th Precinct books, and several so-so movies have been made from them. This is actually one of the better efforts.

I don't think this is a great film, missing the poetry of the great Kurosawa classics, but it is solid work, and a good story told well. That'll do.

All highs -- no lows.
It seems absurd at first that Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece *High and Low* is based on an Ed McBain potboiler. But it's actually typical of Kurosawa, who, perhaps believing that an Occidental-invented art-form like cinema probably benefits from Occidental-type stories, endlessly drew inspiration from popular, even shoddy American tales. His genius was to take our Westerns and detective novels and put them in a specifically Japanese milieu, while at the same time transforming them into universal works of art with his wisdom. All that being said, *High and Low* also happens to be an expertly constructed police procedural / suspense picture. Some of the best scenes in the movie are on the bullet-train with Toshiro Mifune throwing the ransom money out the window, as well as inside the cavernous police station with the masterfully choreographed revelations, one by one, of the details of the kidnapping case by the indefatigable cops. But what makes those scenes fly is the moral urgency behind them . . . something you almost never get from movies of this type. The pacing is brilliant: the aforementioned bullet-train scene breaks the mounting tension from the first hour, but Kurosawa immediately introduces us to the psychopathic kidnapper, setting up some more excruciating tension as the madman tries to lose the scent of the very clever cops on the case. The plot is devilishly complex: we no longer know what to expect when, early on, it's revealed that the kidnapper has taken the wrong child, the son of the industrialist's chauffeur instead of the actual son of the industrialist. We give up trying to figure things out and simply let the director give us the info on a need-to-know basis. The performances are all good: Toshiro Mifune gives a nuanced performance as the anguished shoe manufacturer on the verge of losing his humanity . . . but Tatsuya Nakadai (*Yojimbo* fans will recognize him as the pistol-wielding villain in that movie) as the top cop perhaps impresses more with his absolute refusal to showboat, even though he's given ample opportunity to do so. It's a thoroughly real portrayal. -- Some of my fellow American reviewers here have adopted a "tsk-tsk" stance with regards to the rampant capitalism presented in the movie. Phrases like "a fascinating study of post-War industrial Japan" are slightly redolent of patriarchal superiority, to my ears. Well, yes, the brutal obsession with making money in *High and Low* has a uniquely Japanese flavor, perhaps; but ask yourself this: Who provided the model? Has American capitalism ever been more "humane"? The scene in the Yokohama bar with its drunken, leering Americans (who were unwittingly filmed, btw) reveals Kurosawa's concerns about the capitalist mindset as whole, not just the Japanese version of it. As I said earlier, this director, like all the great ones, transcended his milieu. -- Basically, if someone had a gun to my head or whatever and said, "You can have only ONE Kurosawa in your collection," *High and Low* would probably be the one.

This Is An Extraordinarily Good Film
Watched this a few days ago for about the fifth time and have been thinking about it ever since. I think it probably is my favorite Kurosawa film.

Toshiro Mifune plays a top executive in a shoe company who is secretly planning to take over the company. He wants to keep making quality shoes and gradually expand the market. The other executives want to make cheaper shoes and take advantage of the company's reputation. Mifune has raised every yen he can, including using his house, for the buyout, but his son is kidnapped. For the ransome he'll need all the money he's raised. He's prepared to do this for the sake of his son.

Then he finds out that the kidnappers made a mistake. They kidnapped his driver's son, who is the same age as his own. What a terrible moral dilemma. Would you or I give up every dime we had to save a neighbor's or an employee's son? Mifune does, and this act has a great effect on the police and the public.

The first half of the movie takes place in his house on a hill while all this unfolds. The second half is the chase to find the boy before he's killed and to capture the kidnapper. We move from the intensity of the dilemma unfolding in Mifune's home to the gritty business of the search which takes us into some of the lowest parts of the Japanese underworld.

Mifune is powerful in the role of the father, at first torn by the decision he has to make, then commited to finding his driver's son. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the detective, handsome, smooth, professional, and ultimately deeply touched by Mifune's integrity. Years later Nakadai played the leads in Kurosawa's Kagemusha and Ran. And it was good to see Mifune out of samurai costume.

High and Low is the work of a master. The DVD has the quality and extras one has come to expect from Criterion