60 Years Later: High and Low

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Toshirô Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyôko Kagawa
Running time: 143 minutes

An "import" from "Where? From Japan of all places" reads a patronising New York Times review of Akira Kurosawa's High and Low. Sixty years ago, Western critics must have expected a hard-boiled story like this adaptation of Ed McBain's The King's Ransom to be helmed by someone like John Huston. Set in a contemporary Japan, still damp with the residue of World War II, High and Low is a police procedural which navigates the moral complexity of a post-war Tokyo rife with corporate greed and an accelerating imposition of Westernisation. The film still hasn't got the notoriety of his period epics, but Kurosawa's sprawling, contemporary crime drama holds its own - perhaps even surpasses - when compared to the master's behemoths like Seven Samurai.  

Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), the powerful executive of a shoe company called ‘National Shoes’, is quite literally king of the hill with his swanky, air-conditioned home perched on the apex of a slope overlooking a Tokyo in the throes of a stifling heat wave. He's one of the major players in a power struggle; his fellow shareholders want to push the company in a direction that prioritises cheaper costs and quick profit, much to Gondo’s dismay.   

But our king has a plan. Through an elaborate leverage buyout of National Shoes - in which he intends to stake his entire fortune - Gondo is on the cusp of severing his ties with his greedy peers. It’s a massive gamble, but if it were to pay off it would see him becoming the majority shareholder of a company he’s put his ‘body and soul’ into. Much like his house, Gondo is a man built on strong foundations; practicality, integrity, ruthlessness, an ironclad determination, all fleshed out with all the zeal and bravado one would expect from a Toshiro Mifune performance. However, that air of impregnability is about to be dispelled.  

A botched kidnapping presents Gondo with a nasty catch-22 decision; pay a ransom, saving a life but losing the business he's put his life into, or call the bluff, tainting the company's public image and alienating his customers. This predicament is painfully strewn out in a majestic first act in which we never actually leave Gondo's house. Kurosawa dissects the ever-shifting power dynamics with astute compositions; the air-conditioned atmosphere turns into a pressure cooker, and the walls seem to cave in on us as we're watching a man's carefully-curated existence unravel before us in real time. This kind of one-location filmmaking would have made Hitchcock swoon back in the day. 

Chief Detective Takura, played with understated brilliance by Tatsuya Nakadai, carries out an expansive police operation to try and find the people responsible for this cruel method of extortion. Takura and his peers ground us; their investigation spans the breath of Tokyo, from the corporate offices of National Shoes and the smoky jazz joints, to the bustling fish markets and seedy drug dens. Although this isn't Kurasawa's first contemporary film, High and Low feels like the master's most textured, vibrant and vital portrait of Tokyo.

The focal point of any Kurosawa film is the kineticism of his actors. Anxiety mounts with Gondo’s frantic pacing, urgency pulsates throughout the police HQ when new evidence comes to light; each scene is emoted with absolute clarity. However, there are representations that suffer from the director's penchant for hyperbole - the residence of Tokyo drug den. Their afflictions seem to animate them like strung-out spectres floating around with nothing but the thought of getting well in their minds. If you happened to turn on the TV in the middle of this scene, you’d think you were watching a George Romero film. It probably had shock value at the time, but over half a decade later it feels hammy and heavy-handed, undercutting the narrative's social commentary. 

Despite its missteps it, High and Low isn't only one of Kurosawas’ finest, but one of the finest of all crime films. Watching it sixty years later, it doesn’t take a forensics expert to trace its influence on cinematic history. From David Fincher’s procedural precision in films such as Zodiac to the symbolic class relations in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, Kurosawa’s prints are all over the place, proving that he is a director of insurmountable influence. Be it samurai, Shakespeare or, in this case, Swiss watches, here is a filmmaker who has done it all.