Review of High and Low (1933) by Timothy G — 19 Jan 2017

Akira Kurosawa is counted among the best directors in the world. Best known for Seven Samurai to American audiences, High and Low also deserves a lot more attention here. This is a film about a kidnapping, but it is hardly conventional. You think the film is heading in one way, only to veer off in a totally different direction. The film starts with the machinations of a business takeover, only to veer into a kidnapping story--and by the way, setting up the the best red herring ever seen on film. So now, you think the film is going to be about rescuing the child, but the child is recovered halfway through, and suddenly the film is a police procedural.

Much of the tension in the first half of the film is the result of the film veering off into a different direction. Businessman Kingo Gondo has just mortgaged everything he had in fund his takeover of National Shoes when he receives a phone call from the kidnapper demanding most of that money in return for his son. But then it turns out the kidnapper took the wrong child. Nevertheless, the kidnapper still demands the same ransom, setting up a fascinating moral dilemna for Gondo. It is one thing to break oneself for the return for your own child, but quite another to do it for someone else. The decision Gondo has to make is not easy, and the film does not hold back here. Gondo decides to pay the ransom, and as it turns out, it does break him. Though Gondo earns a great deal of public goodwill, goodwill doesn't pay the bills. Most of the ransom money is recovered, but too late to save Gondo. It's a moral theme we've seen before in Seven Samurai--the duty of the powerful toward the helpless, even at the cost of one's life or financial ruin.

When the film turns to the police procedural, we get a reminder that police could solve crimes without relying on DNA testing. A lot of it is footwork, such as testing which phone booths have the best view of Gondo's living room. Science helps by leading the police to the accomplices, though too late. They amass enough evidence to convict the kidnapper, but the police use good old-fashioned trickery to also convict the kidnapper for murder. Interestingly enough, the police remain all too human here. They want to get the kidnapper for murder as well, but not because they cared about those victims, who were, after all, just drug addicts. That they were murdered doesn't really matter to them. They only have Gondo's suffering in view. The kidnapper, Takeuchi, was brilliant in the planning and execution of the kidnapping, but ultimately was no match for a police department focussed on bringing him in.

Takeuchi's motivation is never fully spelled out, and this is to the film's credit. He had a hard life living under Gondo's hillside house, but Takeuchi apparently never knew Gondo personally. It seems that Gondo's house on the hill, overlooking the city like an overlord and having the comforts of wealth was enough to make Takeuchi hate him. But Takeuchi was a highly intelligent, extremely self-disciplined medical intern. A few years hence, and Takeuchi probably would have been as well off as Gondo. Gondo himself had followed that route, though in his case, he was helped by marrying rich. Nevertheless, Gondo and Takeuchi are in many ways the flip side of the same coin, a fact emphasized in the final scene where their conversation takes place with the reflection of the speaker superimposed on the other. "Must we hate each other?" Gondo asks. The question remains unanswered, but the social commentary inherent in the question speaks volumes.