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"The poor hope for justice, the rich for injustice." [Bertolt Brecht]
It's 1963. In cinemas worldwide, what I consider the most Western film by one of the greatest Japanese directors of all time, and one of the greatest cinematic artists ever, is being screened: High and Low by Akira Kurosawa. A wealthy industrialist, Gondo (played by one of Kurosawa's favorite actors, Toshiro Mifune), is about to close a deal that will make him the major shareholder of the shoe company he works for when he receives a call: a man has kidnapped his son. Or so he believes. In truth, the missing child is the son of Gondo's chauffeur. The ransom demand is enormous: 30 million yen. Initially, Gondo does not want to pay such a sum, because, if he did, he would end up bankrupt. Later, he decides to give all that money to the kidnapper, becoming a hero among the population, despite falling into disgrace. The second part of the film, however, focuses entirely on the police investigation after the child's release, in search of the kidnapper.
With this film, Kurosawa once again challenges himself by venturing into a genre he hadn't yet tackled, creating a full-fledged noir. As mentioned, the film is divided into two parts: the first is completely set in Gondo's house. The only external element in this part is the balcony of the protagonist's large house, on which he occasionally steps out. However, when the police intervene, the windows are darkened with curtains, making the setting even more claustrophobic and increasing the viewer's anxiety. The second part is almost entirely set outdoors, with few exceptions, showing us the degraded slums of a typical Japanese city, with neighborhoods inhabited by addicts, depicted almost like zombies, with movements similar to the living dead in George Romero's films.
An interesting choice is making the audience aware of all the narrative levels of the film, showing the kidnapper's face about halfway through the film, but without providing biographical elements of this character: therefore, we know what he looks like but not who he is. In this way, especially during the second half of the film, when the police try to discover who he is, viewers feel even more on edge (at least, I did) because they want to know everything about the person whose face they know, but the elements of the kidnapper's life are provided slowly, bit by bit.
At this point in the review, to further analyze the film, I am forced to provide a spoiler about the reason that drove the criminal to kidnap a child. If you do not want to know before watching the film, I advise you to skip to the next paragraph. That said, you may wonder: why the Brecht quote at the beginning of the review? In general, one might think that the Austrian playwright was right. But in the case of this film, the situation is completely reversed, because the kidnapper did what he did out of envy for Gondo's great wealth: in fact, from the criminal's house, one can clearly see the industrialist's large mansion, generating anger in the kidnapper's soul. In this way, to reduce the rich to poor by "stealing" all his money and enriching himself, he opts for the path of injustice, forcing the rich to resort to justice. This social connotation is primarily made evident by the original title, translated into English as "High and Low" but which, as I have read (not knowing Japanese), literally should mean "Heaven and Hell," a clear reference to the world of the rich (heaven) and that of the poor (hell).
Speaking instead of the more technical aspect, Kurosawa proves once again to be a true master of the art of cinema, playing with camera angles in a mosaic of shots as diverse from each other as they are coherent, which help the tension of the film, and giving us a powerful black and white, with only one color insert, reminiscent of old films in the nascent cinema era, when celluloid was hand-colored, as in some films by Georges Méliès, essential for the discovery of the criminal. Among the films of Kurosawa I have seen, this is undoubtedly one of the strongest and most engaging, both in terms of the plot and the direction, aided by a peculiar use of music: almost entirely absent in the first part and increasingly present in the second, almost as if produced by the life of the city. A masterpiece not to be missed.
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