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High and Low

By Scott Tobias  |  July 30, 2008 | 4:02am
Film Reviews DVD
High and Low

Akira Kurosawa's masterful crime thriller High
And Low
is a tale of two movies: The first is a 53-minute potboiler set almost entirely
in a single room, and the second a high-stakes police procedural that zigzags
breathlessly from one lead to the next as it tightens the net on a suspected
kidnapper. One of the remarkable things about the movie is how those halves
interact, as the suffocating tension of confinement gives way to the open air.
There's a different kind of suspense in each situation, with the first half
consumed in extended negotiation and plotting over the kidnapping, and the
second half a race against the clock to hunt down the sociopath responsible.
Through it all, Kurosawa analyzes the smallest possible details in laying out
and cracking the case; in that sense, High And Low is like a proto-Zodiac in its obsessive tracking
of every lead, no matter how obscure or unpromising.

Adapted from Ed McBain's detective novel King's
Ransom, High
And Low
casts Kurosawa favorite Toshirô Mifune as a temperamental shoe-company
executive storing up money to buy a controlling stake in the business. His
ambitious plans hit a snag when a caller informs him that his son has been kidnapped;
the 30 million yen ransom would leave him bankrupt. But here's the twist:
Instead of abducting Mifune's son, the kidnapper has run off with his
chauffeur's son accidentally. Naturally, Mifune wonders how much responsibility
he should have for someone else's kid, but he resolves to pay the ransom
anyway, in the hope that the authorities will recover it in the end.

Though the scenes inside Mifune's hilltop estate sound
like filmed theater, Kurosawa makes them breathtakingly cinematic, filling each
long take with a lot of dynamic movement across his CinemaScope frame. Once the
action opens up, Kurosawa rolls up his sleeves and analyzes each piece of
evidence that comes the detectives' way: In narrowing down the kidnapper's
location, they set a flood of phoned-in leads against small clues like a
child's crude drawing, or the sound a particular train makes as it chugs down
the line. Miraculously, High And Low turns the mundane follow-through of police work
into the stuff of white-knuckle suspense.

Key features: Reigning Kurosawa expert
Stephen Prince contributes a thorough commentary on the first disc, while the
slim supplemental disc is highlighted by a rare 30-minute making-of documentary
for Japanese television.

 
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