The great, towering presence of Toshiro Mifune lends itself to gravitas specifically as Gondo, a fiercely devoted executive for a shoe company called National Shoes. Gondo anticipates a takeover from board members of the company, sensing that their loyalty lies to sales and not their devotion to a superb product (the board members want to use cheaper materials to increase profit.) Gondo refuses to budge despite knowing there could be a takeover and they could sell him out. He has other plans which quickly fall apart when his son is kidnapped, no more than mere seconds after the board members hastily leave their meeting. It turns out that Gondo's son was not kidnapped, it was the chauffeur's son! A call is made expeditiously by the kidnapper to Gondo and if a ransom is not paid (the sum is in the region of what his company is worth), the child will be killed. Whereas Gondo was adamant about paying the ransom when it was presumably his child, he has a change of heart when it involves his chauffeur's offspring. Is money everything and anything - what kind of man values money over a human life? We understand Gondo's dilemma - he will lose his company and his luxurious lifestyle which his wife (Kyôko Kagawa) was more than accustomed to - but should it be a dilemma?
Kurosawa toys with these questions over a man's reluctance to take care of his own, no matter the cost. Mifune doesn't play Gondo as an unsympathetic man, only an unreasonable one who eventually gives in to the kidnapper. The rest of the film follows the police proceeding to find the child and the kidnapper. The child is eventually found but not the kidnapper, and the calculated approach of giving the kidnapper the bags of money by throwing through a window in a moving train will leave you gasping for air. The details of the police investigation are intriguing as we follow the clues from a phone booth location to a plume of pink smoke that serves as a major plot point (the film is in black-and-white with one moment of pink color that is one of the best uses of color ever).
"High and Low" may seem long but every moment counts and is done under the assured direction of Kurosawa, one of our great filmmakers. There is a moment where Gondo is seen outside a shoe store looking in, and the police are surveilling the kidnapper who asks Gondo for a light. It brings up a question of not some inevitable twist around the corner but rather a situation where the have and the have-not meet, only one knows who the other is. There is also a sequence where a bunch of drug addicts are walking around in an alley like zombies with the kidnapper looking for someone to inject with heroin. The pale-faced addicts are all lost souls looking for their next fix in a post-World War II environment. Both as an obvious yet essential statement on how money is an overriding factor in business and relationships and the decay of certain parts of Japan where poverty exists, "High and Low" is never unrelenting or grim but it is a nail-biter with an astounding ending that doesn't feel victorious or triumphant. Vintage crime film by the one and only Kurosawa.
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