At the moment TCM is playing Akira Kurosawa’s film High and Low (1963). You may want to seek it out online. It is a drama starring Toshiro Mifune as a wealthy executive who is told that his son has been kidnapped and being held for ransom. The executive faces a moral dilemma after he realizes that his chauffeur’s son was taken by mistake.
Kurosawa’s films are entertaining in a profound way on their own terms. They were also highly influential on a generation or two of American filmmakers. Kurosawa was a great artist. His films are some of the greatest ever made.
Not surprisingly, Kurosawa loved Shakespeare. Throne of Blood gives us Macbeth as Ran gives us King Lear, Japanese style. That is what goes under the denomination of cultural appropriation in today’s parlance. Can Kurosawa do that? Yes, he can. Kurosawa shows how and why it’s done.
Kurosawa’s samurai films appropriate the genre of the Western from Hollywood. They seem to me to rank up there with the Westerns of John Ford. Hollywood returned the favor in The Outrage (adapted from Rashomon) and The Magnificent Seven (adapted from Seven Samurai). It’s a beautiful world.
The cultural appropriation continues in High and Low. The film is based on the police procedural A King’s Ransom, by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter), but goes far beyond it. It is an amazing film.
At the opening we meet businessman Kingo Gondo as he is engaged in raising funds to buy the shoe manufacturing company he runs. Having raised the funds to save the company in the form he seeks to build on, he is told that his son has been kidnapped for ransom. He will have to use the funds to ransom his son. It is a decision he doesn’t agonize over. He doesn’t give it a second thought.
It turns out, however, that the kidnapper has mistakenly taken the chauffeur’s son. Now what? That is a decision over which Gondo agonizes for a night. The drama is excruciating.
The second half of the film depicts the police pursuit of the kidnapper. In a powerful scene toward the end of the film, Gondo seeks out the kidnapper in prison. He wants to meet the man who threw his life off-course. In a moment of deep humanity, the kidnapper’s face is reflected over Gondo’s. You can glimpse the image in the first few seconds of A.O. Scott’s comments on the film from the Times’s Critics Picks series in the video below.
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