The
original Japanese title of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low translates
directly into “Heaven and Hell”, but the change marks one of the rare times
where an Americanization of the original title is actually an improvement over
the original. There’s no doubt that there’s a dichotomy set up in the film
that separates the film into two parts. First, we see the moral dilemma faced by
Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), a wealthy executive, after he’s forced to choose
between paying the ransom to rescue his chauffeur’s kidnapped son and staging
a hostile takeover of the company that he’s helped build. From his lofty home
on a hill that overlooks Tokyo’s slums, Gondo has become an object deemed
worthy of the insane jealousy of a destitute and desperate lowlife. Midway
through the film, after the police become involved, there is a slightly-botched
handoff that takes the boy out of the picture and the focus of the film shifts
from Gondo’s crisis to that of the police who track the rabid dog of a
criminal through the city’s slums. If Gondo’s penthouse is symbolically
meant to be heaven and the crime-ridden slums are meant to be hell, you can’t
help but think that that allegorical assessment is a bit too straightforward.
Kurosawa’s class politics are almost always on display in his films, but
usually they aren’t reduced to such completely definitive terms.
The
original title leads you to believe there’s little that’s ambiguous in High
and Low’s class structure, but the film itself is slightly more ambivalent
about their differences (at least until the final speech, which suggests the
point of view might be simplistic after all). Certainly the opening scenes of
the film, in which Gordo’s financial predicament is set up paints the
supposedly legitimate businessmen as dastardly thugs who are just as scheming as
the kidnapper. When Gordo himself goes home and finds out about the kidnapping,
we can’t quite guess what his reaction will be since the opening scenes were
complexly layered. These early scenes are by far the most interesting in the
film since the technique that Kurosawa employs in them is designed to show the
range of feeling present in each victim of the crime. Using a master shot for
several masterful camera setups, he shows most of cast on-screen at once, in
varying levels of agony. Each character, from Gordo’s wife, who urges her
husband to give up the money, but has never considered the poverty that it will
bring, to his assistant, who advises him of the pressing nature of his stock
purchase. It’s almost disappointing when the film moves on from this point,
since there’s enough rich material in the setup to fill an entire movie.
High
and Low
eventually comes off its perch and descends into the muck of real life, but the
results are disappointing. Most of the running time after the money is handed
off is spent showing us the police work used to track down the kidnapper, but
those scenes don’t satisfy, since they’re presented matter-of-factly with
all suspense drained from them. Instead of having a boy’s life at stake as the
early scenes did, the latter scenes only have the police department’s attempts
to bring a man to justice driving them, and are far less involving as a result.
Even if the second half, and especially the last half hour, of the film plays
like a descent into a criminally depraved hell, it doesn’t work thematically.
As impressively conceived as the heroin dens, juke joints, and whorehouses that
we see are (though there’s an even better juke joint sequence in Kurosawa’s Drunken
Angel), they don’t have much dramatic function since Kurosawa’s script
wasn’t structured so that we really got a glimpse of “heaven”. I prefer
the title High and Low to Heaven and
Hell precisely because it doesn’t suggest that the “highs” and
“lows” take place within any specific locale, but rather within each
individual. The movie begins asking what it is that makes someone move to a
breaking point where they can commit horrible crimes, and to blame environment
entirely seems far too easy. Since Kurosawa can’t make us believe that the
world that High and Low takes place is
real, as opposed to a writer’s construction, the pessimism that dominates the
film becomes an oppressive turn-off. He wants to make a bold statement about
capitalism’s tendency to transform the world into a place where kindness,
decency, and integrity have no place, but mostly he ends up sounding
cantankerous this time out.
