Tengoku To Jigoku (1963) High And Low - Dual Audio Surround Sound/Colour Scene

Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in Akira Kurosawa’s highly influential High and Low (Tengoku To Jigoku). Adapting Ed McBain’s detective novel King’s Ransom, Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a penetrating portrait of contemporary Japanese society. Criterion is proud to present High and Low in an all-new high-definition digital transfer. Features commentary by Stephen Prince on an integrated second audio track.



The fusion of Western and Japanese elements was a trademark of Kurosawa's films: his reinterpretation of 'Macbeth' for Throne Of Blood springs immediately to mind, but the blending of cultures didn't stop at the director's epics. For his contemporary pieces Kurosawa drew on American thrillers of the 1940s, adapting Dashiell Hammett for Yojimbo and turning to pulp writer Ed McBain for his noirish kidnap thriller High And Low.



Kurosawa cast his perennial favourite Toshirô Mifune as Gondo, a prosperous shoe company exec who's poised to take control of the business before his less principled co-workers do so. However, Gondo's plan is thwarted when his son is abducted and the kidnapper demands a ruinous ransom, which he agrees to pay until it transpires that it's his chauffeur's son who's been taken in error. Gondo must choose between saving the boy's life and destroying everything he's worked for, or extricating himself in order to save his own family from ruin.


High And Low is a film of two halves, the first of which is a stagey drama set in Gondo's luxury hilltop house where the family and the police work through the dilemma. Kurosawa frames the scenes in carefully choreographed and highly populated wide shots, showing Gondo as an imposing and isolated figure as he grapples with the consequences of his power. The second half concerns itself with the police investigation which takes place among the hot, crowded streets of the town below and charts the way the investigation closes in on the perpetrator.



Kurosawa draws a nuanced performance from Mifune, who dominates until the police investigation takes off and the film becomes more concerned with exploring Japan's drug underworld. Despite slowing down in its later stages, the film is a complex mesh of social commentary, thriller and character study and draws towards a tense and memorable conclusion. www.channel4.com




Thanks to evaristegalois for the DVD9.