The following notes on Akira Kurosawa's High and Low were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of High and Low will screen on Saturday, March 23 at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free! The screening is presented with the support of the Center for East Asian Studies at UW Madison.

By Josh Martin

Near the midpoint of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1962), the viewer experiences a pronounced change in perspective. For the first hour of the film, the drama is almost exclusively confined to the interior of a magnificent home, perched high above the Japanese city of Yokohama. This beautiful domicile, an oasis that remains insulated from the harsh chaos of the city, belongs to pitiless shoe executive Kingo Gondo (Toshirō Mifune). Kurosawa aligns the spectator with this elevated position, restricting us to the high-class space that Gondo and his family enjoy. However, the god-like visibility afforded by this home is also what makes this space so vulnerable, so easy to be despised from those below. As the film’s second half commences, Kurosawa presents the exterior of the home from a lower angle—from the perspective of the city’s inhabitants. The house suddenly feels alien and removed, an outlandish beacon of wealth and superiority. Two cops walk through the city below, with one remarking: “The kidnapper’s right. That house gets on your nerves.” Moments later, we meet that very same kidnapper (Tsumotu Yamazaki): a young man in a ramshackle apartment, which features an unobstructed view of this perfect, pristine house. A house that looms over him and the millions of impoverished people throughout Yokohama.

Perspective is everything in High and Low; this is a film that toys with the viewer’s allegiances—with our own moral and ethical positions. The film’s legacy as one of Kurosawa’s most enduring achievements (so enduring, in fact, that Spike Lee will soon direct a remake with Denzel Washington) arises partially from this play with perspective, which allows it to proceed from kidnapping drama to scrupulous procedural to suspense thriller with ease. Based loosely on an American novel by Ed McBain, the film begins with Gondo plotting a hostile takeover of National Shoes Corporation, his longtime employer. He has leveraged everything on this gamble, borrowing against his accumulated capital to usurp his rivals; if the deal falls through, he will lose even “the clothes on [his] back.” On the fringes of this corporate drama, Gondo’s son Jun (Toshio Egi) and Shinichi (Masahiko Shimazu), the son of his loyal chauffeur Aoki (Yutaka Sada), run around the home, playing cowboys and outlaws with a popgun.

Just as Gondo prepares to send his deputy to Osaka to close the deal, he receives a call informing him that his son has been kidnapped. An ultimatum is given: pay an enormous ransom or Jun dies. Only Jun is not in danger: the kidnapper mistakenly took Aoki’s son instead. Thus, a moral dilemma ensues for Gondo. His son is no longer at risk, but another young boy—the only son of his beloved employee—remains in peril. Aoki has no chance of paying the large sum, yet if Gondo pays, his deal will collapse. Everything he built will evaporate in front of his eyes. 

One cannot discuss any Kurosawa film—especially one shot in the luscious widescreen canvas of TohoScope—without emphasizing the meticulous nature of his compositions. High and Low’s first act is contained to spacious rooms, yet the organization and placement of figures within the frame tells the viewer everything about the emotional register of the action. Close-ups of faces huddled around the telephone communicate the urgency of the moment; a long shot of Gondo and Aoki, with a gulf of negative space between them, centers the distance between the positions of these men. Power is revealed through one’s location in the frame – a character’s foregrounding or their placement on the periphery is essential. The fluidity of Kurosawa’s blocking – his control of cinematic space – is nearly indescribable, yet Kurosawa scholar Donald Richie’s on-set account of these practices gives one a sense of his precision. As Richie writes, “extreme care is blended with extreme patience” in a Kurosawa film. For High and Low, Mifune, Nakadai, and their colleagues rehearsed extensively while Kurosawa crafted the camera movements; Richie’s essay chronicles the director correcting subtle discrepancies by each camera operator, aiming for his ideal compositions.

Of course, such stylistic concerns are carefully intertwined with Kurosawa’s thematic preoccupations. When asked by Richie about the message of his picture, Kurosawa responded: “If I could just say it, there wouldn’t be any need to show it.” Questions of social class in Japan—binaries of rich and poor, heaven and hell (the film’s international title), high and low—are all expressed in purely cinematic terms. Following the resolution of the initial crisis, Kurosawa swaps protagonists: Gondo recedes to a supporting role, with Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) and his colleagues taking center stage as they pursue the kidnapper. Working in the tradition of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and other tales of observant police on the hunt, High and Low morphs into a cat-and-mouse thriller, defined by a process-oriented approach. “The criminal must be in these details,” Tokura emphasizes to the throngs of policemen, solidifying the necessity of their painstaking consideration of each clue.

Throughout this section, Kurosawa aligns us with the single-minded modus operandi of the police, whose pursuit raises further ethical questions. As our agents of the state deceive, lie, and employ the press in their manipulations—all in hopes of pursuing the death penalty for the kidnapper, a young medical intern named Takeuchi—the film again aligns us with a challenging position.

Indeed, despite its status as a class-conscious thriller, echoed by more recent pictures such as Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite (2019), High and Low’s politics are far from clear-cut. Critic and scholar Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto notes that Kurosawa claimed to have “made High and Low ‘to show how detestable a kidnapping is,’” an assertion that suggests our identification with wealth and power should perhaps be taken at face value. As such, Yoshimoto notes that many, including Noël Burch, see Kurosawa’s film as “ideologically reactionary,” a “conservative” picture about the virtues of the police and the rich. Yoshimoto rejects such a notion, instead suggesting that “the more a contrast between good and evil is emphasized [in Kurosawa’s cinema], the more a difference between the two becomes ambiguous.”

In a film that cycles through political positions, immersing its viewers in the sphere of wealthy power, determined cops, and desperate criminals, Kurosawa saves the most chilling encounter for last: a meeting between Gondo and Takeuchi in prison. In a series of images that zigzag across the barrier of the reflective prison glass, the two men share their perspectives. Gondo laments their antagonism; Takeuchi expresses no remorse, quipping that it is “amusing to make fortunate men taste the same misery as the unfortunate.” Such gleeful defiance does not preclude an outcry of despair: captured in a long take, Takeuchi lets out a piercing scream, gripping the barrier with an intense fervor. It is not a performative gesture, but, as critic Geoffrey O’Brien frames it, “a scream of pain,” an overflow of excruciating emotion that erupts from deep inside Takeuchi. It is here that we are reminded of Yoshimoto’s insistence: to look beyond Kurosawa’s stated intentions to view clearly what is on the screen. What is visible is a film that views this emotion with immense sympathy, recognizing the honesty of Takeuchi’s anger. For a film that takes such a prismatic approach to the perspective of its characters—in a world where neither Gondo nor Takeuchi truly come out as winners—it is fitting that we end with Takeuchi’s cry, a “scream of pain” that remains haunting today.