By David in TN
friday, november 14, 2025 at 7:20:00 p.m. est
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is High and Low (1963), a Japanese film starring Toshiro Mifune.
An executive on the outs with his company gets in deeper when he pays off kidnappers who have abducted the wrong boy.
N.S.: I won't tell you that this is Kurosawa's greatest picture. After all, he'd already made Rashomon (1950) and Seven Samurai (1954), but this'll do.
Based on the 1957 Ed McBain (real name: Salvatore Lombino, aka Evan Hunter) thriller, King's Ransom, Mifune plays a shoe executive, Kingo Gondo, who has worked his way up from the bottom, learning every bit of the shoe trade. (And he still has his apprentice's tools!) Now, on the eve of his dramatic, surprise takeover of the shoe company where he is one of several top executives, and on which he has gambled everything, he learns that a ruthless criminal has kidnapped his little son. Actually, not his son--the man has accidentally kidnapped the wrong boy! He has taken his chauffeur's son, who is the same age and size as his boy, and his best friend. Can Gondo permit the kidnapper to murder his chauffeur's boy?
While McBain/Lombino's novel was well done, Kurosawa and his co-scenarists created a much more ambitious story.
First of all, the picture is for Kurosawa autobiographical. Whoever sent King's Ransom to him, must have known him well enough to catch this angle. Kurosawa first trained as an artist. Then he learned every aspect of moviemaking, in order to become an assistant director.
Then there is the doppelgänger (double) angle (Hitchcock's favorite schema), which was not in the novel. Gondo and the kidnapper are both brilliant men who started with nothing. The criminal lives down in the cramped bowels of the city, while the executive lives up on the hill in a palatial house that the kidnapper views from below.
High and Low is also a paean to the Dr. Mabuse movies, which were made, initially in 1922, by the husband-and-wife team of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou. Dr. Mabuse was a criminal genius, who went mad. The pictures, first as silents, were written by von Harbou and directed by Lang. (Lang also always gave himself a screenwriting credit, as well, but I find that aspect dubious.)
(See Dr. Mabuse, Part I and Dr. Mabuse, Part II, uncut, for free, and without commercial interruption, at WEJB/NSU.)
Thea von Harbou was the greatest female and greatest German screenwriter of all time. And yet, all compilers of such lists have snubbed her. Why? Because she was a Nazi. Meanwhile, Austrian-German-American director Fritz Lang is given all sorts of credit that he never would have gotten, without von Harbou. And why is that? Because he was a Jew! Nazis and Jews, eh?! (Think also Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975).)
High and Low is also about the role of intelligence in society. The detectives, though very intelligent, cannot solve the crime on their own. They must rely, for that, on amateurs.
Kurosawa and his collaborators created several brilliant set-pieces, two of which involved bodies in space.
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3 comments:
Great movie. They ought to show STRAY DOG (1949), also a noir of sorts- A police detective's gun is stolen, and he searches all over Tokyo looking for it. It's an incredible tour of post-War Japan, showing how Americanized their culture had become, despite just having been at war with us! (We even get to see their baseball stadiums.) The 2nd-unit director was Ishiro Honda, soon to become famous for his classic sci-fi noir, the original GODZILLA (And a host of lesser follow-ups). Honda worked again with Kurosawa on some of his latter-day movies like RAN and DREAMS.
-RM
Sounds pretty good--an interesting plot. I'd lean towards giving it a view someday,except for all the jap actors and subtitles(I assume). lol.
--GRA
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:30 and 10 a.m. ET is Leslie Kardos' The Strip (1951) with Mickey Rooney, Sally Forrest, William Demarest, James Craig, Kay Brown, Tom Powers.
Film Noir Guide: "When his girlfriend (Forrest) is found shot and his ex-boss (Craig) is murdered, jazz drummer Rooney is questioned by homicide detective Powers and, via flashback, we hear his side of the sordid tale."
Wounded in Korea, Rooney leaves the hospital with a new set of drums and heads for Hollywood and, he hopes, a career in music. Along the way he meets bookie Craig, who gives him a job as a phone man in a horse-betting parlor."
"Rooney, while escaping a police raid, runs into Forrest, a pretty wannabe actress, who works as a cigarette girl and dancer in a Sunset Strip dance joint owned by Demarest (Uncle Charlie in TV's My Three Sons). Rooney falls hard for her and signs on as a drummer at the club just so he can be close to her."
"Trying to make an impression, the little drummer makes the mistake of introducing her to Craig, hoping he'll be able to help her break into the movies. But the suave bookie has more on his mind than being helpful, and Forrest doesn't seem to mind the attention. Fearing he's losing his girl, the obsessed Rooney begins following them around."
"This standard crime drama works well thanks to a good performance by Rooney, who did his own drumming, and some terrific jazz from Louis Armstrong and His Band. Crooner Vic Damone appears as himself."
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