Tengoku to jigoku / High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)Adam & Matty's takes (starts at 31:36)This is a rewatch I approached with some trepidation. I first watched High and Low on the big screen, and after being ever-so-slightly disappointed (very relatively, but still) with Rashômon the second time around. About 30 minutes in, I felt reassured: still a masterpiece, and now pretty clearly my favorite Kurosawa, pending a Seven Samurai rewatch (or something I haven't yet seen like Stray Dog or Kagemusha).
I remember being so surprised discovering after the fact that Mifune was in the main role here, having only seen him in the aforementioned period films. Even now, it's striking how different he looks from Yôjinbô, only two years before. This performance is the one that really makes the case for Mifune as a great actor as well as a movie star: it might not be as iconic as either his Rashômon/Seven Samurai wild antics or his Yôjinbô/Sanjûrô stoic coolness, but it's much more layered, and absolutely essential for the film to work at all.
The divide between the two halves isn't as stark as I remembered it to be, and I love the way Kurosawa does it: in the first half, we have no idea what the policemen might be thinking at all, they only exist as a matter of their function, letting the family/employees dynamics play out without interevening... and in the second half, it's Mifune's turn: we see him, and we get touches of character here and there: probably the most significant line he has in only related to us (him saying to his gardner that they only have time to spend now), much like the first steps of the police's investigation take place entirely off-screen in the first half. There are two scenes of transition there: the one in the train (where we get the inspector sharing his changing opinion of Mifune's character) and immediately after that in what I think is the last scene taking place in the room the entire first hour is set in. After that, we end the transition with a quick scene of the policemen in their car, going down from paradise to hell, which I believe is what the film's title translates as.
Whole books could probably be written about the way characters are positioned in relation with each other in that first half: sitting down, standing up, going to the window, facing away from each other, sitting or standing apart from everyone else, crouching, etc. I think Adam mentions it feeling like a ballet, and there is something to that. If you looked at the script here, you'd think the first part of the film would basically amount to filmed theater, but Kurosawa makes it as dynamic as it could possibly be, and he does it in a way that is very meaningful and... well maybe not subtle exactly, but not too flashy either.
The more I write about it, the more I feel like anything I can say about it only diminishes and trivializes what the film accomplishes. I can say that the second half, as well as being a captivating and enthralling detail-oriented police procedural, is the most gorgeous hour of his whole B&W filmography (a stipulation I have to include because Ran exists), at least from what I've seen. At one point he seems to casually invent the zombie genre five years early, with heroin addicts that are just as unsettling as Romero's living dead. The whole thing feels like a culmination of his career (maybe it's just being at the end of the marathon that makes me feel that way, I remember thinking the same thing about Bergman and Fanny & Alexander): the only thing missing is a swordfight really, even Takashi Shimura shows up for a brief cameo.
The handling of Mifune's character is the key I think. In a way Kurosawa stacks the deck in his favor, by having him be a self-made man who truly came from the bottom and worked his way to the top, and eventually proves to be willing to do it all over again. His resistance to the greedy executives early on, the choice he ultimately makes regarding the ransom and everything he does after that, all of those point to him being an impossibly great man. But that'd be forgetting that his first decision is to refuse to pay, even after sleeping on it. He only does the right thing after being betrayed by his underling, at which point he arguably has lost everything already. It doesn't diminish it exactly: it's still a tough choice because it means accepting that he's lost everything right then and now, but that's enough to make him nuanced, and to make the hero worship in the second half feel appropriately uncomfortable. His righteousness is his luxury: yes he is righteous, and yes the kidnapper is despicable, but the praise he gets (and the way the whole police department seems to dedicate itself to his cause and nothing else) is somehow indecent.
The confrontation between the two ends the film as it should: with him silent and stoic and the other desperate and frantic. There's something that feels subversive in the way Kurosawa makes the policemen so eager to please Mifune's character, to avenge him, in the second half: they're from the lower class, but they are instruments of the higher class: they're the ones doing the dirty work, he's the one who gets to be magnanimous and to get the praise.
10/10