Tag Archives: Crime Film

HIGH AND LOW (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

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For the first 55 minutes HIGH AND LOW (Akira Kurosawa, 1963) is a sparse and minimalist chamber piece in which moral and ethical considerations are put into play, in dazzling long takes and expressive compositions. Mr. Gondo’s business associates present him with a plot to oust the current head of the shoe company they all work for. Sales have been stagnant.  The current president is old fashioned. They would make more profits by making more fashionable shoes with in-built obsolescence. If they all gather their shares they could take control of the company. Mr. Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) turns them down. What he doesn’t tell them is he’s mortgaged everything he owns in order to get 50 million to buy a majority share, take over himself, and build shoes that are both fashionable and good quality. As he kicks his associates from his house, Gondo gets a phone call saying his child has been kidnapped and they are asking for a 30 million ransom. If he pays this, it will cost him all he’s worked for since he was a 16 year-old apprentice, his plans for his future, possibly his home. He’s willing to do that for his son. But he will he do the same for someone else’s son? It turns out that the kidnappers have made a mistake and have kidnapped the chauffeur’s son instead. The two moments were the chauffeur gets on his knees, first to beg for his son’s life, and then, once again, when Gondo agrees to pay the ransom and the chauffeur realises the full extent of the sacrifice , were most moving. What is a life worth? Is the life of a chauffeur’s son worth the same as that of an industrialist’s son. What is loyalty? What are a person’s obligations and responsibilities and how should one act to meet them? It’s superb.

The second hour and a quarter turns the film into an exciting police procedural. Who did it? Why? How to find the culprit? In this half, the film descends from the heights of Mr. Gondo’s apartment to the lower depths. The transition is an exciting scene on a train shot with multiple handheld cameras of the exchange of the money for the child.

This is introduced by a wipe, and there’s something to be thought about in the way Kurosawa uses wipes, it’s not just a transition, it’s a move in time, space, mood.

There will be another wipe when we’re introduced to the perpetrator, the camera picks up his reflection in a pond, follows him, through a slum, and into his room where we finally see his face as he then checks out the newspapers and radio to find out where he stands in relation to the police’s investigation.

There’s another incredible scene in a heroin den that is as brilliant a piece of cinema as I’ve seen (the way Kurosawa frames, the balance between close-ups underlining individuals, and the more crowded shot symbolising crime and affliction, the frames within frames, the way the camera is often outside a window looking in, often also through a curtain or screen, the moments of showmanship (the light reflecting on the sunglasses). It really is quite extraordinary.

The film ends with a conversation between the industrialist and the perpetrator. I won’t spoil the film by divulging the reasons for the kidnapping but will merely note that Kurosawa films the reflection of one on the face of the other. Then in the last shot we are left with a pensive industrialist meditating on his own reflection, interestingly with his face not being visible either in the foreground or in the reflection.

It’s a great film. It was also the number one box office success of its year.

I also very much liked Spike Lee’s remake of this, which I will now see again but I don’t remember it being as elegant or as moving.

More images from film:

THE BAD SLEEP WELL/ Warui Jatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)

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Another extraordinary crime film from Akira Kurosawa, this one dealing with corporate corruption. What I found most remarkable was the story-telling, of which the opening scene is an extraordinary example. It starts theatrically with a group of waiters making a greeting line in front of a lift. The doors slide open, and we get a wedding party. The door opens again and this time it’s a whole gaggle of paparazzi, who will act as a Greek chorus, doing quite a bit of exposition, telling us who the main characters are, filling in background, contradicting or elaborating upon what the characters themselves are telling us. It’s a wedding, a happy occasion but after the first 30 seconds the drama begins. We see that the bride is crippled, walking on crutches with one foot higher than the other. The father is the head of the corporation. The groom is poor. Did he marry her just for her money? As the wedding banquet proceeds, the police arrive, we see messages of an imminent arrest passed around and on top of it,  the brother says if the groom doesn’t make his sister happy he’ll kill her. After the nervous applause dies down, the wedding cake gets brought in. But there are two, one of them a scale-model of a building where a man jumped off the seventh floor, with a rose marking the exact spot, linking the current scandal and some of the top managers who work there to the previous one where they had worked at before. As one of the journalists says at the end of the opening scene, ‘A funny wedding, the best one-act play I ever saw’. ‘A one-act play,’ says another. This is merely a prelude’. And indeed a newspaper appears on the screen, ‘A big scandal unfolding. Police raid Dairyu. A chain of investigations’. The main narrative is well and truly on its way. It’s fantastically told visually (the choice of shots and compositions), musically (the abruptness with which the music often stops), the use of close-ups to single out individuals, how every beat in the story adds information whilst increasing the drama.

It is really superb and so is the rest of the film. A revenge film in which Mifune seeks to avenge his father’s death by destroying the life of the father of his wife. It’s supposedly influenced by Hamlet, though I can at best detect a loose resemblance. The themes are however Shakespearean, a man destroying his life to keep his position, a young man seeking to write wrongs who commits even worse ones, a wife torn between love for her husband and duty to her father. It’s a film where no one wins except the viewer.

 

Tony Zhou has a very fine short essay on Kurosawa’s compositions in The Bad Sleep Well, which you can see here.

PS I see now from wiki that ‘ Francis Ford Coppola has listed The Bad Sleep Well as one of his favorite films, citing the first thirty minutes of the film “as perfect as any film I’ve ever seen” and used it as inspiration for the wedding sequence in the 1972 Oscar-winning gangster drama The Godfather,’ which makes all kinds of sense.

José Arroyo