So up until now, I’ve been writing about Akira Kurosawa films I had already seen; only now have I taken advantage of the riches of the Film Forum going on now in New York and seen for the first time Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963). I do encourage everyone living in striking distance of New York to get out and attend this thing; it’s a great opportunity. As for High and Low itself, I strongly recommend it–perhaps not on a level with Rashomon and Ran, but at the same time, it presents a side of Kurosawa you don’t get from his best known films.

High and Low (literally Heaven and Hell, and why on earth change it?) is a contemporary (well, it was contemporary in the 60’s) thriller. A long establishing scene features shoe executive Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) resisting a ploy by his fellow middle managers for the company to make inferior, but more profitable shoes. The conspirators leave. Immediately Gondo recieves a phone call that his son has been kidnapped. But moments later, his son cheerfully enters the room. A prank? But the boy was playing with the son of Gondo’s chauffeur, and the kidnapper has accidentally nabbed him instead. The scene is set for a tense crime drama. But as usual, it ends up being a lot more than that.

High and Low is basically two films welded together. The first is an incredibly tense drama played out solely in the living room of Gondo’s home (which the camera doesn’t leave for the first hour) as he and smart, competent policemen try to outsmart the kidnapper. A brilliant handoff sequence follows in which Gondo heaves the ransom money from a moving train–sacrificing his future; he needed the money to prevent the hostile buyout. Following on this is a rather long police procedural in which Tokyo cops try to identify the kidnapper.

The film was loosely based on the novel King’s Ransom by Ed McBain, one of the English language’s greatest crime novelists. McBain was known for crafting realistic procedurals in which the cops painstakingly sift through the evidence, and sometimes just sit around waiting for a break; the influence is obvious in what some may find overlong and dull scenes of police business. But the payoff comes in the final act, when the culprit is apprehended and has a face-to-face confrontation with Gondo.

High and Low is a strange film. It isn’t really a whodunnit; there isn’t a large enough preliminary cast of characters to provide suspects. It’s only slightly more a howdunnit; the kidnapper’s plan is ingenious but simple. Really it’s a whydunnit: assuming the culprit is not, obviously, one of Gondo’s fellow executives, who would have reason to destroy the life of this basically decent man? But somebody did.

I’ve said before that Kurosawa “wears his heart on his sleeve,” and the title of this film points at its resolution. It takes on shades of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Gondo lives in a mansion high on a hill; which we hardly realize at first because the camera remains in the home. Someone has been looking up at that mansion and thinking bad thoughts. Gondo must go through an intense moral struggle; but essentially, he is a good man. Isn’t he? Someone doesn’t think so. High and Low is ultimately harrowing, if it does seem less structurally neat than other of Kurosawa’s films. I give it full marks.

Note: This films takes us physically from Gondo’s hilltop mansion to a filthy alley where heroin addicts congregate: it is a progress from Heaven to Hell. My own apartment building literally straddles the border between Bronxville and Yonkers, New York. Walk six blocks in one direction, and you see some of the wealthiest people in the state. Six blocks in the other direction, and you’re practically in the ghetto. I have to admit–this film made me think.