Rent High and Low (1963)

A Master Film - High and Low review by JE

One that i would easily put amongst the very best i've seen overall, a classic of it's kind and well worth seeing.

The only problem is that it is not available on Blu-ray as The Criterion Collection Edition which is in this superior format (especially for the older features) is only available in the Americas on Region A, it really ought to be made available for the other regions.

A Screen Novel - a rewardingly complex narrative - High and Low review by AP

This is a film that worked well on several levels for me. The narrative intermeshes a takeover bid by the protagonist, Gondo, of National Shoes, a kidnapping and the payment of the ransom, and the detective work that leads to the arrest and conviction of the kidnapper. Much of the first half is dramatically very intense, set either in Gondo's house that looks down over the shanty town where the kidnapper lives, or on a train from which the ransom is to be thrown. The second half is a police procedural which is as carefully constructed as the detective work.

This framework allows Kurosawa to offer the audience a lot to think about. Gondo is effectively a self-made man who believes in good quality shoes, and has worked hard to resist the trend to make shoes that are throwaway fashion. Faced with what he believes to be the kidnap of his son, only to discover that it was in fact his chauffeur's son who has been taken, at first he refuses to pay the ransom. Then, under pressure from both his conscience and his wife's restrained implorations, he agrees to forgo buying the shares that would have given him control of National Shoes and phones the bank to get the money. Gondo is played by Mifune, whose acting is exemplary: I was particularly struck by the dignified, courteous businesslike manner he uses when, after 45 minutes of violently shifting emotions, he calls his bank manager. It is the beginning of his discovery of his humanity.

Humanity is clearly a quality lacking in the National Shoes executives who want to improve profits by producing third rate shoes. Kurosawa uses 'Bo'sun', an elderly senior detective who's seen it all, to act as a moral reference point: his disgust with the absence of co-operation from the National Shoes executives in the police investigation to find the kidnapper is specially notable. Similarly, the detective leading the investigation team, reflecting apparently Kurosawa’s own sense that Japanese justice was getting soft, is determined to pursue a course of action that will allow him to push for the death penalty for the kidnapper.

But even the kidnapper is allowed his point of view. Kurosawa does not flinch from sending him to his death, but in his final scene in which the kidnapper speaks in prison face-to-face with Gondo, he is allowed to voice his sense of the burning inequalities in society that led him to take such desperate actions. Nevertheless, it is Gondo Kurosawa holds up for our approbation: his career ruined by paying the ransom, he has taken up a position with another shoe company which he hopes to build into a success. He knows he has to strive, but Mifune’s performance shows he has learned a certain humility: gone is the overbearing assertiveness we did not admire in the first part of the film. Kurosawa’s perennial theme that life is about learning how to be better is set against the kidnapper’s uncompromising surrender to his hatreds.

The other major thing that struck me was the depiction of the police as both efficient, dedicated and motivated by a humanity that we cannot but admire.

There is much else to admire in the film: the depiction of heroin addicts; the use Kurosawa makes to newspapers to espouse what he wants to promote as his moral line by having them represent Gondo's payment of the ransom as laudable; Japan’s opening up to western cultural influences; the quietness and dignity of Gondo’s wife; the visual composition of each scene; Mifune’s use of telling gesture, and his ability to act even with his back; the clarity with which the police assemble their evidence; cameos, such as that of the tram worker who recognises exactly where a tram was travelling by listening to the sound of it on a police recording of a phone call… All in all, I felt this was as near to a novel as a film can get, and that made it a film that, as a former English teacher, I felt I could ‘read’ perceptively. Recommended.