High and Low, a.k.a. Tengoku to jigoku (Akira Kurosawa Productions, Toho Studios, 1963)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 17) my husband Charles and I watched a Criterion Collection Blu-Ray disc of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 detective thriller High and Low. As I’ve mentioned before, Kurosawa got stereotyped as “the samurai director,” probably because his 1954 film The Seven Samurai was the movie that made his international reputation (though the multiple-point-of-view drama Rashomon had begun the process four years earlier), but at least half of his movies, including this one, took place in 20th Century Japan. I’d bought this Blu-Ray after Charles and I had missed Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” showing of it on Turner Classic Movies a few months ago. I first heard of this film in 1975, when I bought William K. Everson’s 1972 book The Detective in Film partly because it had the most complete chapter on the Sherlock Holmes movies published to that time. Everson wrote about High and Low at the end of a chapter called “The Oriental Detectives” even though he acknowledged that it was a far deeper and richer movie than the Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, and Mr. Wong films he was otherwise profiling. But it wasn’t until the late 1990’s, when Charles and I were watching old movies I was literally recording by the yard onto VHS tapes, that I finally got a chance to see it. High and Low actually began as an American story, King’s Ransom, one of the 87th Precinct mystery novels written by Evan Hunter (true name: Salvatore Albert Lombino) in his “Ed McBain” identity. Like the other 87th Precinct novels, King’s Ransom, published in 1959, is set in a thinly disguised New York City; like the real one, it has five boroughs, but Manhattan is called “Isola” because it’s on an island. Brooklyn is called “Calm’s Point,” Queens “Majesta,” The Bronx “Riverhead,” and Staten Island “Bethtown.” High and Low was made in 1963 after Kurosawa’s employers, Toho Studios, bought the rights in 1961 for $5,000. Kurosawa and three co-writers, Hideo Oguni, Ryûzô Kikushima, and Eijirô Hisaita, transposed the story of King’s Ransom to Japan but kept the basic conflict: a Japanese shoe-company executive, Kingo Gondô (Toshiro Mifune), is about to stage a coup at his employer, National Shoes (the English name is actually used), to drive out both the company’s founder (a stick-in-the-mud conservative who doesn’t believe in updating the company’s products to be more fashionable) and the younger members of the board of directors (who want to reduce the quality of the company’s products in order to cut costs and create planned obsolescence).

He’s amassed 50 million yen to buy a controlling interest in the company and is about to send his assistant Kawanishi (Tatsuya Mihashi) out of town to complete the transaction, when suddenly he receives a phone call claiming that his son Jun (Toshio Egi) has been kidnapped, and the ransom is 30 million yen. Just then Jun turns up alive, well, and free after he’d been out playing with Shinichi Aoki (Masahiko Shimazu), the son of Gondô’s chauffeur (Yutaka Sada). It turns out that the kidnappers grabbed Shinichi by mistake, partly because the two boys had switched clothes, but are still holding out for the full 30 million yen ransom. Having mortgaged himself to the hilt to cover the cost of his leveraged buyout, Gondô will be financially ruined if he pays the ransom, but his wife Reiko (Kyôko Kagawa) insists that he has a moral duty to pay it, and ultimately he does so. The kidnappers give detailed instructions as to just how the money is supposed to be packaged and delivered, and the first hour of High and Low is set almost entirely in Gondô’s living room in a series of increasingly anxious phone calls between Gondô, his wife, and his staff. (When we first saw the movie Charles was surprised that Reiko was dressed in traditional Japanese garb, while the men were all in Western business suits.) The kidnappers have given Gondô an elaborate set of instructions on how to pass the ransom to them via a cross-country train before they return the boy. Shinichi is returned an hour into this 143-minute film, and the rest of it deals with the attempts of the Japanese police on the case – chief detectives Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) and “Bos’n” Taguchi (Kenjirô Ishiyama); detectives Arai (Isao Kimura) and Nakao (Takeshi Katô); and the chief of the investigation section (Takashi Shimura) – to find the kidnappers and recover as much of the ransom money as they can. Their efforts are complicated by Aoki, who borrows Gondô’s Mercedes car and drives his son Shinichi along the route on which the kidnappers took him to see if anything jogs his memory as to where he was held. Through a series of sound clues, including a trolley whose noise could be heard in the background of some of the recorded phone calls between the kidnappers and Gondô, the police finally trace the kidnappers to a house nearby Gondô’s hilltop villa. But when the cops raid the house, they find the two accomplice kidnappers, a drug-addicted couple, both dead of overdoses of pharmacologically near-pure heroin. (I couldn’t help but remember this was how Janis Joplin died: she had been off the drug for a few weeks making her last album, Pearl, when the night before she was scheduled to record her final vocal she decided to celebrate by having another shot of heroin. Alas, she got an unusually pure sample and it killed her.)

Ultimately the police find out the identity of the main kidnapper: a medical intern named Ginjirô Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki) who masterminded the whole scheme out of status envy: his little apartment had a bird’s-eye view of Gondô’s villa and he decided to get his class-based revenge on the man by kidnapping his child. The cops lure Takeuchi out of hiding by releasing a false story to the Japanese media that the two drug addicts are still alive, and Takeuchi descends into a Lower Depths-like underworld of Yokohama’s drug scene to pick up a woman in the final stages of addiction and test his latest dose of pharmacologically pure heroin on her. Arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death, Takeuchi refuses to see a prison chaplain and instead demands that Gondô be brought to him so he can tell him personally just why his son was targeted. High and Low is a fascinating film even though it changes tone at the one-hour mark; before that it’s a moral tale and after that it’s the kind of police procedural one expects from an Ed McBain adaptation. William K. Everson acknowledged the American roots of this story and said the film “is not markedly Japanese in theme or action, other than for the value it places on personal honor and integrity.” But he wrote something about the film that doesn’t at all match what I saw in it: “Toshiro Mifune’s ordinary, confused little businessman is a superbly realistic portrait, the bravura style of his samurai roles completely suppressed.” What I saw in Mifune’s performance was exactly the kind of relentless overacting he did in his samurai parts, albeit it’s understandable because the kidnapping happens at a time when he’s bet everything on a big business deal and he loses it all. (There are two later scenes in the film that carry an implicit critique of capitalism. In one, the executives of National Shoes, realizing what a public-relations nightmare they’ve created for themselves by firing Gondô at the height of sympathetic media coverage of him, offer to rehire him for a job but one with no actual responsibilities; and he angrily turns them down. In another, it turns out that even though everything in his home is being auctioned off, he's landed on his feet: the police recovered most of the ransom money and he’s got a job with a smaller shoe company he intends to build up as a rival to National.)

There are also some odd bits about the physical environment, particularly the cars used in the film. Though Japan was still set up on the British system, in which the car’s steering wheel is on the right-hand side and you drive on the left, a number of foreign cars appear in the film, mostly American Chevrolets and (Gondô’s car) a German Mercedes, with their steering wheels on the left. But the only Japanese vehicles seen in the film are Toyotas, which made me wonder if Toho and Toyota had a contract that only Toyota cars would be used in Toho films. (Contracts like that were quite common in the U.S. at the time, especially for TV series.) It’s an interesting look at what Japanese cars looked like just before they started exporting them to the U.S. High and Low is a quite remarkable film, showing that Kurosawa’s genius extended to modern stories as well as tales of Japan’s historic past, and though some of the disjunctures jar (particularly the grim portrayal of the drug underworld towards the end) and the cops aren’t as strongly etched as individual characters the way they are in McBain’s books, all in all it’s a great movie that, as Everson said, “should be given the highest priority rating by any detective devotee whom the film has so far eluded.”