Last week on Criterion I watched High and Low, a 1963 Japanese crime thriller directed by Akira Kurosawa, loosely adapted from the novel King’s Ransom by Evan Hunter. It starred Toshiro Mifune as a businessman struggling for control of the shoe company of which he is a board member. He negotiates a buyout of the company with his life savings, then a kidnapper mistakenly abducts his chauffeur’s son, thinking it’s the businessman’s son, then decides to extort him for 30 million yen anyway.
I liked how this movie, over the course of two and a half hours, was broken up into three parts: the businessman and the kidnapper: the events after the crime and the police trying to find the kidnapper and his accomplices; and the kidnapper himself. There’s a lot about class commentary, as the businessman is wealthy and lives in a house up high, while the kidnapper is down in the slums and resents the rich capitalists. It was a really interesting movie, and since Spike Lee has his American remake of it coming out soon, Highest 2 Lowest, I wanted to watch the original.
I also liked seeing Tatsuya Nakadai as the chief inspector in the kidnapping case, as I just mainly know him from The Human Condition film series from the late fifties/early sixties.
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