high and low (1963)
In my ongoing quest to keep watching cool movies and not lose my mind in the hell world that we now live in, I recently watched Akira Kurosawa's High and Low for the first time. I have written about Kurosawa before; his movies are always amazing, and I am fairly confident I could do nothing but watch through his catalog of films and be content.1 You will be shocked to learn that High and Low is no exception. There will be spoilers below.
What I said when I was done watching High and Low was, "That movie went places." It starts in the fancy house of our hero, Kingo Gondo (as played by the inestimable Toshiro Mifune), as some of his fellow executives at the shoe company he owns a share in try to convince him to engage in some corporate skulduggery, and for a good while we never leave that house. Kurosawa's mastery of blocking to tell a story really shines here: at one point there are seven characters in shot and every single one of them is doing something there. There is not a wasted presence.
We spend enough time here that you'd be forgiven for thinking the entire movie will take place in this house. A kidnapper tries to kidnap Gondo's son and hold him for ransom, and we get to see Gondo's desperate reaction, how he is willing to do anything, to destitute himself, to keep his son safe; then we find out the kidnapper actually got the wrong kid, and Gondo is immediately unwilling to put his wealth at risk, rationalizing that the kidnapper probably wouldn't really kill anyone. We see the emotions of Gondo, his wife, his son, the cops, the servant whose son was kidnapped. We have all the makings of a compelling stage play.
He finally breaks down and agrees to make the payment, and the cops do some tricks to help make sure the kidnapper is caught, including hiding a material that gives off a vibrant pink smoke when it is burned in the cases the money will be dropped off in. And then we have an extended sequence where the entire goddamn police force mobilizes to try to track down this kidnapper after the exchange is made. The media is mobilized to help trick the kidnapper; we keep seeing headlines about how heroic millionaire Gondo has sacrificed his wealth and is facing destitution, all to save a kid that wasn't even his own. Everyone loves a noble millionaire.
And then, after a scene with a shock of pink smoke in this otherwise black and white film, we find the kidnapper, track him down, go from the big "we're scouring the city for this guy using every resource we have available" to the closer "we're putting a tail on the kidnapper and are trying to catch him doing a murder so we can get him the death sentence instead of just fifteen years in prison", and we get, as someone I was watching this with put it, to the low part of High and Low.
The kidnapper used some heroin addicts to help him in the kidnapping, and to ensure their silence, has murdered them by giving them pure heroin, so that they overdosed. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't know they're dead yet, so the cops forge a letter from them demanding more dope, so he tries to do another murder. We spend a long time tailing him, from the docks, to a lively nightclub where he picks up the heroin, and finally to a place the cops call "dope alley", a rundown section of town that is absolutely packed with heroin addicts. He picks out an addict, tests it on her to make sure it's strong enough to kill--it is--and then, only then, he heads up to try to kill his accomplices again. And only then do the cops arrest him.
We've seen how the cops mobilized what seemed to be the entire police force to track down one person who had harmed a millionaire; and we now get to see how they simply do not care about the plight of those unfortunates that inhabit "dope alley." A woman dies and they mainly just seem glad that they can nail this guy with a murder charge.
In our final shot, the soon-to-be-executed kidnapper asks to see Gondo before he dies. This is our first real interaction with the kidnapper, but what's interesting about the scene to me is Gondo: he's not here to absolve the killer, nor to condemn him. He's just here. He has a new job doing what he loves. The title of the movie would be better translated Heaven and Hell, but for all of that, for the entire movie, Gondo very firmly occupies the kingdom of earth.
The film is subtle in its condemnation of the hypocrisies of capitalistic society, but it's impossible to miss them once you know where to look. Is anything that happens after the child is safely returned justice? Would the police have mobilized the entire force like this if a millionaire's wealth weren't being threatened? Why do the police care so little about the people in the place they call "dope alley?"
High and Low has, as is by now traditional with Kurosawa, given me a lot to think about, and is yet another film I'm excited to revisit down the line.
I am aiming for watching one new movie to me per month, and also revisiting one movie per month, and I expect a lot of Kurosawa to feature; I do miss finding new directors to fall in love with, though, so I am also trying to reach out more broadly.↩