Reviewing High and Low

For the week of Metal Gear Solid’s twenty-fifth anniversary, let’s hop on the way-back machine and go back to sometime even before Hideo Kojima’s birth date. High and Low co-written and directed by Akira Kurosawa came out in Japan on March the first, 1963, one week short of six months before the infant Hideo was born. Both before and after his nasty departure from Konami Digital Entertainment, Hideo Kojima had called this one his favorite Akira Kurosawa film. Given that said nasty departure from Konami and reopening shop under Sony does resemble a subplot of this film, Kojima’s affection for this movie does seem honest.

A brief history of viewing Akira Kurosawa movies

Hidden Fortress was the first Akira Kurosawa flick I had ever seen from beginning to end, tried Seven Samurai a decade before that and did not stick for its end. George Lucas had listed that movie as a main inspiration for 1977’s Star Wars, so watching it in the year 2015 did not do Force Awakens any favor in the eyes of yours truly. While slow at places compared to modern blockbusters, the spark of liveliness in older films simply is simply nowhere to be seen in modern cinema.

Then I had watched period pieces like Rashomon, Yojimbo, Sanjuro and Throne of Blood. Strangely, Kurosawa was actually known as a good director of contemporary to his time back then. A view of Ikiru did make me see why: he did have the chop to make night life in Japan look like something at home in Twilight Zone.

One can say that Kurosawa was stock mentally with monochrome. 1954, the same year as his Seven Samurai, Miyamoto Musashi was film marketed for being shot with Easter Color film. To be fair, color film back then did feel like video game marketing focusing on ray-tracking in 2023. Still, Kurosawa still shooting in black and white even into the 1960s did make him bit old-school. Well, at least with High and Low, color was inserted into one single shot.

Every piece matters

Based on King’s Ransom by Ed McBain (as listed in the film’s Japanese opening credits), High and Low is a movie about cops solving a kidnap case. Clocked at 143 minutes, it plays out like 2 Wire episodes, one over 60 minutes long season premiere and one feature length season finale play out back-to-back. The first 61 minutes are about saving the kidnapped while the remaining 82 minutes contain the cat and mouse game between cops and the kidnapper.

The film falls under the “15 minutes rule” of feature length movie. Regardless of length and genre, many films have their first 15 minutes meandering about some other stories, then at a quarter of hour they finally kick into their marketed genre. First 15 minutes of High and Low seem to be about corporate intrigue. The soon to be blackmailed Kingo Gondo played by Toshiro Mifune was planning a gambit to acquire controlling share of the National Shoes company he oversee production for. As he has the fund of 50 million ready, a phone call comes in claiming his son is kidnapped for a ransom of 30 million.

Turns out his son is fine but the boy’s playmate and the son of Gondo’s chaffuer was taken. The cops are called and Gondo start to having an internal debate about to pay the ransom or not. Pay the ransom and save the boy is obviously the right thing to do, yet it means Gondo’s gambit to buy his company “back” will fail. So many eager him to do the right thing for more than one reason. The chauffeur himself rightfully wants his son back, Mrs. Gondo wants her husband to take the moral high ground and Gondo’s assistant in the company want Gondo’s secret gambit to fail so his position in the company can be secured.

Of course, Mr. Gondo finally caves in and decides to pay the ransom. And after 54 minutes spent solely in the Gondo resident, action finally moves upon a train, where ransom will be dropped and kidnapped boy is saved. Policenauts contains a similar scene in a museum, though without details like the bags for ransom, view of the hostage, the drop spot and the kidnapper’s getaway vehicle.

From there, the focus switches from the blackmail victim Gondo towards Tokura, the cop in charge of this case. Tokura was played by Tatsuya Nakadai, who did play villains against Mifune’s Sanjuro in both Yojimbo and Sanjuro. In some way, his roles in those movies were getting more “boring” by installment: from rock star like bandit in Yojimbo; then a crooked samurai, focus on “samurai”, in Sanjuro. Tokura in High and Low is practically how the Wire’s Jim McNulty would imagine himself in the mirror.

Also regarding Sanjuro, that one originally had a shot of partially colored shot with flowers. Then High and Low has a partially colored shot of pink smoke, something the cops planted in ransom bags to keep the track from going cold.

The police work in this movie is painstakingly detailed and mostly about surveillance versus counter-surveillance. Given that the kidnapper demands the blackmailed not to call the cops, police detectives enter the Gondo resident disguising as apartment store employees. Since the Gondo resident is a house on a hill overseeing a slum, view is key. And cops would only identify the kidnapper after 2 big meetings of laying out clues and narrowing down their tracks.

The perpetrator in this movie does not have a speaking line until the 134th minute mark. He can be seen reading newspaper, observing Gondo hill house from his slum department and up to some ill deeds under police surveillance all without the need to utter a word. Or at least not a word the audience needs to hear. Without going to details, let’s just say that Tarantino sure stole a lot from this one for the first third of Pulp Fiction.

It's said that Kurosawa and his 3 co-writers did change the end of King’s Ransom. While Gondo in the movie does get the ransom back, it is not soon enough for him to buy the controlling share of his old company. The money would only support his family, then he as a shoemaker found employer who would give him a blanker check. It’s not hard to imagine Hideo Kojima rewatching this one after Kojima Production reopened under Sony and felt something. Gondo was against his old pivoting from quality to quantity. He failed, voted out of the company and had to find a new job. Then he got a blank check off the screen and told the man who blackmailed him.

Final thoughts

While undoubtedly an Akira Kurosawa film, the seven kanjis read “Kuro Sawa Akira Kan Doku Saku Hin” meaning “An Akira Kurosawa Film” are nowhere to be seen in the movie. Instead it’s just listed as “A co-production of Toho Pictures and Kurosawa Productions”. “Directed by Akira Kurosawa” is the last piece of credits before the story starts, so I guess it’s fitting to credit a film about team work with the team rather than the individual leading the team. Either way, this one is all fans of cop film ought to see for themselves.