High and Low (1963 film)

Template:Short description Template:Good article Template:Use British English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox film

Template:Nihongo is a 1963 Japanese police procedural film directed by Akira Kurosawa. It was written by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Template:Ill, and Ryūzō Kikushima as a loose adaptation of the 1959 novel King's Ransom by Evan Hunter. Starring Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyōko Kagawa and Tatsuya Mihashi, it tells the story of Japanese businessman Kingo Gondō (Mifune) struggling for control of the major shoe company at which he is a board member. He plans a leveraged buyout of the company with his life savings, when a kidnapper mistakenly abducts his chauffeur's son to ransom him for Template:¥. The film is viewed as influential on police procedural cinema, and has been remade multiple times internationally.

The film was produced by Toho, who bought the rights to Hunter's novel in 1961 for $5,000.Template:Efn Working on a production budget of Template:¥, filming on High and Low began on 2 September 1962, taking place on location at Yokohama and on set at Toho Studios. Only one attempt could be made to film the ransom exchange. The shoot required multiple cameramen, leading to all other film productions to be shut down for the day. Filming ended on 30 January 1963. Kurosawa worked with Masaru Satō to score the film in their eighth collaboration together; the film's soundtrack contains a variety of influences, including mambo, Classical, and modern popular music. Post-production took just under a month and, after test-screenings in mid-February 1963, the film received a wide distribution.

High and Low was released in Japan on 1 March 1963 and became the highest-grossing film at the Japanese box office for that year. The film received generally positive reviews both domestically and abroad. In September 1963, the film premiered overseas as part of the Official Selection for the Venice Film Festival. The limited American release of the film in late November coincided with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, this event led to a depression in initial box office takings. High and Low was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globe Awards for 1964. Critical opinion of the film has remained high, with analyses of the film focusing on Kurosawa's humanism in tackling the issue of a growing class divide, the growth of an international consumer culture, and the film's use of structure to interrogate morality and social division.

Plot

Wealthy executive Kingo Gondō is engaged in a struggle to gain control of the company National Shoes. The board of the company is split between executives seeking to make cheap and low-quality shoes, and the ageing largest shareholder who makes sturdy but unfashionable shoes. Gondō rejects these plans, envisioning a strategy requiring high production costs for long-term profitability. He has secretly set up a leveraged buyout to gain control of the company, mortgaging all his property. Just as he is about to put the plan into action, Gondō receives a phone call from someone claiming to have kidnapped his son, Jun. Gondō is prepared to pay the ransom, but the call is dismissed as a prank when Jun returns home from playing outside. However, Jun's playmate Shinichi, the child of Gondō's chauffeur, is missing as the kidnappers had mistakenly abducted him instead.

In another phone call, the kidnapper reveals that he has discovered his mistake but still demands the same ransom. Gondō is forced to make a decision whether to pay the ransom to save the child or complete the buyout. After contemplating it, Gondō announces that he will not pay the ransom, fearing that doing so would jeopardise his job, his finances, and the future of his family. His plans are thwarted when his top aide lets the "cheap shoes" faction know about the kidnapping in return for a promotion should they take over. Finally, after continuous pleading from the chauffeur and under pressure from his wife, Gondō decides to pay the ransom. The evening prior to the ransom exchange, Gondō fixes two briefcases to contain pods that release a foul odour when submerged in water or pink smoke when burnt. Following the kidnapper's instructions, the money is put into the briefcases and thrown out from a moving train. Shinichi is safely recovered at the site of the money drop.

The police undertake an investigation using clues from the kidnapper's phone calls and Shinichi's memory to determine his identity. They eventually find the hideout where Shinichi was kept prisoner, discovering two bodies of the kidnapper's accomplices suspiciously killed by an overdose of heroin. The police surmise that the kidnapper engineered their deaths by supplying them with uncut drugs. Meanwhile, Gondō is forced out of the company and his creditors demand the collateral put up against his loan in lieu of the debt. Seeking the support of the press, the police encourage them to report the story widely and help misdirect the kidnapper with a false report. Gondō is seen as a hero, while the National Shoes Company is vilified. Further clues, culminating in a plume of pink smoke, lead to the identity of the kidnapper: a medical intern at a nearby hospital. However, the police lack hard evidence to link him to the murder of his accomplices.

The police lay a trap by first planting a false story in the newspapers implying that the accomplices are still alive, and then forging a note from them demanding more drugs. Concerned about his accomplices, the kidnapper tests the drugs' strength on another drug addict who overdoses and dies. The kidnapper is apprehended at the accomplices' hideout by the police while trying to supply another lethal dose of uncut heroin. Most of the ransom money is recovered, but it is too late to save Gondō's property from auction. With the kidnapper facing a death sentence, he requests to see Gondō while in prison. Gondō agrees to meet him face to face. At this time, Gondō is now working for a rival shoe company, earning less money but enjoying much less oversight in running it. The kidnapper tells Gondō that he has no regrets for his actions, explaining that envy from seeing Gondō's house on the hill every day led him to conceive of the crime. Gradually losing his composure, he shrieks as he is dragged away and a screen divides the two of them, leaving Gondō alone.

Cast

Main cast

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Other characters

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Production

Development

Evan Hunter (credited under his pen name Ed McBain) c. 1953

High and LowTemplate:'s screenplay was co-written by Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Template:Ill, and Ryūzō Kikushima.Template:Sfn The story is based on Evan Hunter's novel King's Ransom (1959). Toho purchased the rights to adapt the novel in 1961 for $5,000.Template:Efn Template:Sfn The film contains significant differences from the novel.Template:Sfn Much of the story during and after the ransom exchange is not present in the original work.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The film departs from the novel by placing emphasis on social issues and the class perspective of the protagonist; drugs are featured, and Gondō does not catch the kidnapper himself.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The script was written with an ending that depicted Inspector Tokura and Gondō having a conversation.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

The script was written straight-to-final draft (a process that creates a production-ready screenplay without writing prior drafts and treatments), similarly to Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962) before it.Template:Sfn Kurosawa said after the release of Red Beard (1965) that he made High and Low because his friend's son was kidnapped.Template:Sfn Speaking to Joan Mellen, he described wanting to stress the leniency of Japanese kidnapping laws and their inadequate attention to the suffering of the victims.Template:Sfn Despite not being particularly impressed with the writing of Hunter's novel, Kurosawa was struck by the concept of the novel's kidnapping. Even though he was shocked at the brazenness and cruelty of the crime depicted, Kurosawa felt that Yamazaki's character deserved some sympathy, partially due to his background and situation.Template:Sfn

Pre-production and production

The film procured a budget of Template:¥.Template:Efn Template:Sfn Pre-production began on 20 July 1962, when Kurosawa began casting roles that had not yet been filled. He cast Tsutomu Yamazaki to play the role of the kidnapper, possibly at the suggestion of his former assistant, Template:Ill, who had Yamazaki in the film Template:Ill (1962). Yamazaki recalled feeling anxious and nauseous during the audition, calming down only after he began exchanging lines with Kurosawa.Template:Sfn The role launched him to acting success, appearing in two more of Kurosawa's films—Red Beard and Kagemusha (1980)—and starring in the TV series Hissatsu Shiokinin (1973).Template:Sfn Kurosawa also included cameos by his previous collaborators, including the star of his first film Sanshiro Sugata (1943), Susumu Fujita, and character actor Masao Shimizu.Template:Sfn

High and Low was filmed at Toho Studios and on location in Yokohama.Template:Sfn The film was shot using TohoScope, a widescreen filming system.Template:Sfn Filming began on 2 September 1962 with the first act, the majority of which was filmed at Toho Studios.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Many of the takes shot for the film's first half were ten minutes long, and it is possible that they would have been longer if the capacity of the cameras' magazines were larger.Template:Sfn Two different sets were used to film Gondō's home overlooking Yokohama. One was filmed on location, overlooking the city. The night scenes, showing the same location and view, were filmed with a miniature display outside the window, as the outside of the location set could not be photographed well at night. Long-distance lenses were used, particularly to obtain close-ups, as the camera rarely entered the set. It was constructed as a room with an open wall.Template:Sfn During production of his films, Kurosawa would take his frustrations out on the cast and crew, a pattern that became worse during High and LowTemplate:'s creation—it was here that his reputation of making difficulties for the studio and those working on the film began to precede him.Template:Sfn

The ransom exchange sequence (wherein money is dropped through the open window of a Kodama express train) required nine cameras to film and was shot almost entirely with hand-helds.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn All the cameramen at Toho were required to film simultaneously, which led to every other film production being shut down for the day. One camera was positioned under the bridge where the money drop took place, two eight-millimetres photographed the kidnappers at the ends of the train, and detectives were each followed by two cameras.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn There was only one attempt to film the scene due to the reservation and use of the express train.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn During the take, one of the cameras following Takeshi Katō on the train malfunctioned and did not capture the scene. The crew had to reshoot his part on a different day.Template:Sfn According to script supervisor Teruyo Nogami, during this scene, a nearby building hid the face of one of the kidnapper's accomplices. To fix the issue, alterations were made to the second floor of the building with a blue sheet used to disguise these alterations, a job conceived and executed just a day before filming took place.Template:Sfn However, film critic Atsushi Kobayashi writes that it was instead a prefabricated construction worker's dormitory that was blocking the view of Shinichi, which was removed by stagehands.Template:Sfn

The Yokohama exteriors were filmed in January 1963, but the cold weather made it difficult to act convincingly as if it were summer. For one scene, Kurosawa dyed the nearby river with black paint and poured dirt into it to make the environment filthier.Template:Sfn The scene depicting a slum where the kidnapper buys a second lethal dose of heroin was shot on set, but was modelled after Koganechō, which was a hotbed of sex work and drug trafficking. The police accompanied location scouters to the area due to the danger.Template:Sfn The location of the final scene took inspiration from prisons in other countries, installing glass doors and wire mesh behind the windows.Template:Sfn An additional large set was made for the original final scene that depicted a conversation between Gondō and Inspector Tokura.Template:Sfn While filming the final scene, Yamazaki burnt his hands on the wire mesh from the heat of the lighting.Template:Sfn Filming ended on 30 January 1963.Template:Sfn

Editing

The use of multiple cameras simultaneously during the film's first half meant that a ten-minute scene would have a corresponding hour of footage to cut between.Template:Sfn The use of multiple camera perspectives to film the ransom exchange sequence was an unprecedented shoot that required Kurosawa's particular attention during the editing process.Template:Sfn Kurosawa employed colour for the first time in his career mid-way through the film.Template:Sfn The use of a trail of pink smoke in a pair of shots drives the investigation forward. According to film theorist Noël Burch, the moment acts as a singularising pivot that determines the investigative response.Template:Sfn At this point in his career, Kurosawa felt that he and his crew were still too unfamiliar with the use of colour in film, and so decided to continue shooting films in black and white.Template:Sfn

The original script ending was changed when Kurosawa noted the performance of Yamazaki as being especially powerful. The original final scene contained a reflective conversation between Mifune and Nakadai.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The crew spent two weeks filming the scene that initially followed the confrontation between Gondō and the kidnapper Takeuchi, but Kurosawa ultimately decided to cut it in favour of the final ending.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The film was test-screened in mid-February.Template:Sfn The final cut is 3,924 metres of film in length.Template:Sfn

Music

High and Low was scored by Masaru Satō—his eighth collaboration with Akira Kurosawa. The film includes music from The H-Man (1958), also by Satō, such as "The Magic Begins" sung by Yumi Shirakawa.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The opening titles feature a slow mambo, which is used as a tone-setter and thereafter used sparingly throughout the rest of the film.Template:Sfn Satō was inspired by his mentor Fumio Hayasaka's final work, which had been influenced by rhythmless jazz music, and so composed the opening titles as a conscious development of their work together on Hayasaka's final film soundtrack I Live in Fear (1955).Template:Sfn During the scene where the kidnapper is first seen by the audience, Franz Schubert's Trout Quintet can be heard on the radio.Template:Sfn Kurosawa had originally wanted to use "Greenfields" by The Brothers Four and Elvis Presley's "It's Now or Never", but could not buy the rights.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Around the city, jazz music is often heard, all of which are Satō's original compositions.Template:Sfn

To Kurosawa, music in films was supposed to reflect the mood of the scene, with its context and volume under tight control. The music's context either supports or contrasts the image by way of aural cues, for example, the use of trumpets with the discovery of new leads in the film to amplify the success of the investigation.Template:Sfn When the police are in pursuit of the kidnapper, the Neapolitan song "'O sole mio" is played,Template:Sfn but during climactic scenes, the relative lack of music was intentional so as to not disrupt important or dramatic moments.Template:Sfn

Themes

Morality and the class divide

In his analysis of intertextuality, Donald Richie, a scholar and acquaintance of Kurosawa, notes the oppositional extremity of High and LowTemplate:'s Japanese title, Template:Translit—which translates to 'heaven and hell'—and underlines that by comparing Yokohama to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. In this comparison, Gondō takes on the role of Dante, at first unaware of the moral conflict ahead of him, with the accompanying police representing the angels, demigods, and Virgil.Template:Sfn To Richie, the moral character of the film is black and white: Kurosawa aligns Gondō with the representatives of heaven, with 'heaven' and 'hell' contrasted until Gondō and Takeuchi are forced to reconcile with the fact that they had caused each other pain.Template:Sfn Stuart Galbraith IV also invokes Dante in the depiction of the film's environment, noting that while Gondō's 'heavenly' house looks down on the people below, this is contrasted with a 'hell' in Yokohama "that is, in part at least, seductive."Template:Sfn He further proposes that Gondō's nouveau riche background and moral compass matches that of Kurosawa and Mifune's own.Template:Sfn

When asked in 1975 whether it was correct to view the film as being anti-capitalist, Kurosawa responded:

Well, I did not want to say so formally. I always have many issues about which I am angry, including capitalism. Although I don't intend explicitly to put my feelings and principles into films, these angers slowly seep through. They naturally penetrate my filmmaking.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

According to Stephen Prince, the film creates a false reality via images and technologies (such as radios, cameras, telephones, and tape recorders). The perspective mediated by these technologies conceals the social tensions between the lives of Gondō and Takeuchi.Template:Sfn He underscores this by focusing on how Kurosawa's use of blocking positions the characters to create and reflect different social and moral relationships.Template:Sfn The social divisions are never reconciled and synthesised, but remain hidden by Gondō's appeal to humanism to overcome these divisions in his final confrontation with the kidnapper.Template:Sfn Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto considers its class commentary reactionary for de-emphasising Gondō's class status by sympathising with him in favour of promoting a humanistic ideal.Template:Sfn However, the film scholar James Goodwin views this class divide as being dramatised by Gondō's loss of wealth, as such, the superimposed images of Gondō and the kidnappers' faces over each other in the final scene visually associates them with a shared psychology.Template:Sfn The historian David Conrad comments a reversal of the usual association of Kurosawa's films with humanism; that the film ends by condoning capital punishment as an acceptable outcome of the justice system.Template:Sfn

Commercialism and modern Japan

To Conrad, the film's foregrounding of Japan's economic growth (such as the proliferation of personal luxuries, cars, and air conditioning) reflects the country's growing internationalism.Template:Sfn This growth of international and consumer culture is seen in elements such as the Old West cowboy outfits Jun and Shinichi are seen wearing, and the nightclub seen towards the end of the film.Template:Sfn He describes "the specter of miscegenation" that is evoked in the nightclub scene by having foreign men and Japanese women dancing together. The scene highlights the contemporary social restriction on interracial dating while subtly placing foreign influence under suspicion by linking it to the location of criminal activity.Template:Sfn In particular, Conrad draws attention to the narrative's drug-related criminal theme and waste management as parts of the police investigation that indicate the concerns of contemporary society.Template:Sfn The role of police has also been criticised by film scholar James Maxfield as revealing the structure of Japan's capitalist society itself to be "a significant crime". He suggests that the police's inaction to save an addict who becomes a victim of the kidnapper's uncut heroin characterises them as uncaring. This also weakens the audience's belief in the investigation's success.Template:Sfn

Also commenting on the changes in Japanese society, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto wrote about the film as an embodiment of urban anxiety during Japan's post–World War II recovery. As Yokohama was rebuilt, its streets and society did not fit with older maps of the area.Template:Sfn Yoshimoto thus views the characters' subjectivities as being formed by the contemporary redevelopment of Yokohama, the detectives having to interpret the new social and spatial changes to progress in the investigation.Template:Sfn He concludes that despite this, the film does not fully reflect a renewed sense of national identity, however.Template:Sfn Film scholar Mike Phillips identifies the film with a form of remediation: which acts as a criticism of early financialisation (a change in economies that places more emphasis on financial services rather than material goods) through the absorption of popular and consumer culture in society.Template:Sfn He sees the Old West outfits worn by Jun and Shinichi as embodying this material culture which links TV westerns with an "ephemerality" that allows the kidnapper to treat the children as interchangeable commodities.Template:Sfn To Phillips the film's final scene presents a dialectic relationship between Gondō and the kidnapper wherein Gondō's reflection in the window embodies a material rejection of television as a symbol of this cultural commodification.Template:Sfn

Structure

A picture showing two detectives looking up at Gondō's house on the hill, with an array of smaller rickety houses in the foreground

Kingo Gondō's expensive house (background) and the houses of the shanty town downhill (middle ground) framed together in the film

Prince notes, in his study of Kurosawa's filmography, a dialectical structure in High and Low.Template:Sfn The narrative change from the wealthy Gondō's home to the shanty town below offers an opposing view to the ordered and confined space of the first half.Template:Sfn Goodwin views the use of a police investigation for the narrative's structure to be an interrogation of social divisions and the nature of power on the human spirit. He compares the third act's showdown in the unrecovered slum with the sump in Drunken Angel (1948) and the bombed out factories in The Bad Sleep Well (1960) as aspects of the environment that represent these social divisions.Template:Sfn

Film scholar David Desser divides High and Low into three sections, describing the shift from Gondō's home, to the detectives investigating, and the kidnapper's world as "planes of action" that follow a chronology, moving from 'high' to 'low'.Template:Sfn He notes the process of the police investigation as a thematic tension between Kurosawa's humanistic sentiment and formalistic tendencies.Template:Sfn To Desser, the humanism present in the film demonstrates a transcendence of its adapted source material's structure.Template:Sfn Matthew Bernstein writes on the recontextualisation of the novel as reframing the story around a moral and social critique of modern Japan. Gondō's character was changed dramatically from Hunter's novel, effectively sidelining him from the second half of the story so that he may learn the humanistic obligation the individual has to society.Template:Sfn

Philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes in his book Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1983), that High and Low demonstrates the situation-action paradigm in its structure. To Deleuze, situation-action is a structural formula, it refers to an understanding of spatial and environmental factors in the film's frame that enable characters within the story to act. In High and Low, the narrative's second half is a "senseless, brutal action" after the confined and theatrical space of its situational first half.Template:Sfn He believes that this transition from situation to action represents an expansion of space in the film which sees the exploration and exposition of its moral themes of 'heaven and hell'; at the same time, the Kurosawan hero crosses through that expanded space laterally by acting. The process of the situation-action paradigm in the film represents a mutual agreement across the class divide.Template:Sfn

Release

Theatrical

File:High and Low (1963) - US Trailer.webm

High and Low was released in Japan on 1 March 1963.Template:Sfn The film was conceived and released as part of a series of commemorative films marking Toho's thirtieth anniversary the previous year.Template:Sfn The number of kidnappings in Japan increased slightly following the film's release. Kurosawa had intended to inspire harsher punishments by emphasising the crime's lenient sentencing, but was instead blamed for an increase in kidnapping cases.Template:Sfn People called the Kurosawa household and threatened to kidnap the director's daughter, Kazuko. She was driven to and from school everyday, and forbidden from leaving the house as a precaution to prevent a potential kidnapping.Template:Sfn

In August 1963, the film was entered into the Venice Film Festival as part of the Official Selection (placing it competition for the festival's awards).Template:Sfn Toho International released the film with English subtitles in the United States on 26 November 1963. Debuting in Toho Cinema, New York, the film acquired a wider, though modest, distribution through Walter Reade–Sterling.Template:Sfn High and Low was reissued in Japan in 1969 and 1977.Template:Sfn The film was re-released in the United States, on new 35 mm prints in 1986, and again in 2002 as part of the "Kurosawa & Mifune" film festival.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn In January and February 2023, the British Film Institute (BFI) ran a Kurosawa Season, providing platform for guest hosts (Asif Kapadia, Sonali Joshi, and Ian Haydn Smith) to discuss the major themes permeating Kurosawa's work, starting with High and Low.Template:Sfn

Home media

A VHS version of the film was released by Home Vision Cinema, with The Criterion Collection responsible for the release of a DVD.Template:Sfn A Blu-ray version was released on 26 July 2011; included are interviews with Tsutomu Yamazaki and Toshiro Mifune, and a 37-minute documentary detailing the film's production.Template:Sfn In 2009, Criterion also released High and Low alongside other Kurosawa films in a box set.Template:Sfn The BFI released a DVD of the film on 28 March 2005, with a Blu-ray version released on 27 January 2025.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn

Reception

Box office

The film was a box office success in Japan, garnering ¥460.2 million in ticket salesTemplate:Efn and becoming the highest grossing domestic film that year.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Ticket sales during the film's opening week at the Toho Cinema in New York were dampened by the assassination of John F. Kennedy four days prior.Template:Sfn At the end of its eight-week run in that cinema alone, the film generated around $46,800 total in box office returns.Template:Efn Beginning in its fifth week, the penultimate week of December in 1963, it started to play in different cinemas across New York.Template:Sfn The re-release of High and Low in 2002 as part of a multi-title film festival accrued $561,692 in total.Template:Efn Template:Sfn

Critical response

Contemporary opinion

Contemporary reviews of High and Low were generally positive.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn A review in Kinema Junpo magazine praised the film's direction, proclaiming it "a masterpiece" with a rich imagination, however criticising the lack of characterisation and "organic unity" between the film's two halves.Template:Sfn Upon viewing the film, the critic Tadao Sato considered it, along with other works of Kurosawa's made after I Live in Fear (1955), to be drained of thematic and sentimental meaning. He thought the characters acted irrationally, particularly concerning the motivation of Yamazaki's kidnapper.Template:Sfn

Most American reviewers found High and LowTemplate:'s formal style captivating, but did not think the source content was worthy of the art.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic lauded the film's technical elements but questioned why Kurosawa made the film, believing it retained a facile sense of the moral conflict in detective fiction from Hunter's novel.Template:Sfn In Time magazine's review, Kurosawa's scene composition was praised, as was his ability to build suspense; yet the review criticised its pacing after the kidnapper's identity is discovered, further referring to the film as "hackneyed, and at times implausible".Template:Sfn Upon release in the United States, some critics questioned whether investigative techniques such as handwriting profiling and voiceprint analysis were possible in Japan at the time.Template:Sfn

Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune praised Kurosawa's creation of suspense and the expansion of the novel's moral conflict, but she did not consider it one of the ten best films of the year.Template:Sfn The New York Times considered the film to be an outstanding achievement among detective films, going on to commend the execution of the ransom-exchange on the train and the performances of Mifune and Nakadai.Template:Sfn The Los Angeles Times considered it a structural departure from Kurosawa's earlier films, celebrating High and LowTemplate:'s camera work and social perspective.Template:Sfn Writing for the Kenyon Review in 1965, Charles Higham praised the film's blocking and geometric design before analysing the film's third act as a humanistic exposure of modern Japan.Template:Sfn

Sight and Sound, viewing the film at the Venice Film Festival, dismissed it as "turgid and disappointing".Template:Sfn Upon release in the UK, a 1967 review in the magazine by Robert Vas singled out High and LowTemplate:'s structure as particularly inspired. Vas commended the film's technical elements, including the lighting and blocking, but he criticised the film's ending as an uncomplicated message delivered by obvious metaphors.Template:Sfn A negative review in Cahiers du Cinéma dismissed the film's modern context and its "metaphysics and morality [...] taking precedence over suspense", despite praising the train scene as beautiful, it further criticised the film for police apologia and having sympathy for its rich protagonist.Template:Sfn

Retrospective opinion

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, High and Low has an approval rating of 97% based on 66 critic reviews; those with a score formed an average of 8.3/10.Template:Sfn Tsutomu Yamazaki, viewing the film nearly 30 years after its release at the Sydney Film Festival, still considered the film "fresh and interesting", but cringed upon seeing his own acting. Meanwhile, Yutaka Sada considered it his best performance in all of Kurosawa's films.Template:Sfn The filmmaker Takashi Miike recalled feeling a kinship with the film, including an obsession with its final scene.Template:Sfn Director Martin Scorsese included it on a list of "39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker" in 2014, and on the list of his 84 favorite films in 2024.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn In a GQ interview published in June 2025, game designer Hideo Kojima named it as one of his four favorite films, though he noted his preferences shift over time.Template:Sfn

In a 1988 special edition of Kinema Junpo magazine, a poll of readers and 39 critics ranked the film the second best film of 1963, behind only The Insect Woman.Template:Sfn Prior to the 1986 American re-release of High and Low, Paul Attanasio, writing in The Washington Post, noted that it did not count among Kurosawa's masterpieces, but favourably compared the film's plot and symbolism with William Shakespeare's plays and connected the film with Throne of Blood (1957), Kurosawa's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, saying that High and Low is "Macbeth, if Macbeth had married better."Template:Sfn David Parkinson, writing for Empire in 2006, gave it four out of five stars, commenting on the film's use of obscured comparison between social classes to illustrate that the equality between men is separated by the choices they make when faced with crisis.Template:Sfn Scott Tobias wrote for The A.V. Club in 2008 that the film's divided structure heightened the film's realism to create a powerful sense of suspense.Template:Sfn

In 2024, Slant Magazine named the film the 42nd best film noir, lauding its moral complexity as an elevation of the genre.Template:Sfn That same year, Paste magazine ranked it as Kurosawa's 5th best film, praising the film's structure for effectively using tense scenes to reveal the psychology of its characters.Template:Sfn Writing for The Guardian in 2025, Peter Bradshaw rated High and Low five stars out of five, praising the film's storytelling and moral dilemma, he refers to Gondō as "the ultimate capitalist ... [who finds] it isn't at all clear if he thinks his compromised moral heroism and sacrifice has been worth it."Template:Sfn

Awards

Template:Plain row headers

Award	Date of ceremony	Category	Recipient(s)	Result	Template:Refh
Mainichi Film Awards	Template:Dts	Best Film	High and Low	rowspan="2" Template:Won	Template:Sfn
Mainichi Film Awards	Template:Dts	Best Screenplay	Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Eijirō Hisaita, Ryūzō Kikushima		Template:Sfn
Venice International Film Festival	[[24th Venice International Film Festival\|Template:Dts]]	Golden Lion	High and Low	Template:Nominated	Template:Sfn
Edgar Awards	1964	Best Foreign Film	High and Low	Template:Nominated	Template:Sfn Template:Sfn
Golden Globe Awards	[[21st Golden Globe Awards\|Template:Dts]]	Foreign Film – Foreign Language	High and Low	Template:Nominated	Template:Sfn

Legacy

High and Low is considered by some to be among Kurosawa's greatest works, despite receiving comparatively less acclaim than his films in the 1950s.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Film scholar Audie Bock appraised the film as the last of Kurosawa's great humanitarian dramas, believing his subsequent films to be too sanctimonious, containing a different moral sense.Template:Sfn It has been compared to Kurosawa's earlier police procedural Stray Dog (1949), marked by similar moral and social themes in an unfolding crime investigation set during summer.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The film has been viewed as influential on the genre of police procedurals, including the films of Bong Joon Ho and David Fincher.Template:Sfn Template:Sfn The Korean film Parasite (2019), directed and co-written by Bong, has a similar premise to Kurosawa's film: a family living in an expensive house on a hill are unknowingly shadowed by criminals living in the poorer, lower part of the city. Bong affirmed these similarities between High and Low and ParasiteTemplate:'s framing of the class difference in discussing the design of his characters' houses.Template:Sfn The final prison sequence also inspired the set design for the asylum in The Batman (2022).Template:Sfn

The Indian film Inkaar (1977) is a Bollywood remake of High and Low.Template:Sfn The rights to remake the film were acquired by Universal in 1993, and Martin Scorsese was set to direct a script written by David Mamet, but the project lingered in development purgatory; an attempt to revive it in 2001 with Scorsese as co-producer also failed to materialise.Template:Sfn In 2007, the film was adapted into a J-drama by Yasuo Tsuruhashi for TV Asahi.Template:Sfn The plot of the miniseries Full Circle (2023) was inspired by High and Low.Template:Sfn A reinterpretation of the film directed by Spike Lee, titled Highest 2 Lowest, was released in 2025.Template:Sfn

Notes

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References

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Bibliography

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Template:Akira Kurosawa Template:Ed McBain Template:Mainichi Film Award for Best Film Template:Authority control

High and Low (1963 film)

Contents

Plot