Watching The Detectives: High and Low (Dir. Akira Kurosawa, 2h23m, 1963)

Detective fiction only reached Japan during the Meiji period in the latter half of the 19th century, yet few other countries have taken to the genre like it. It has its own godfather of the genre, Edogawa Ranpo, a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle aficionado from a young age, its own iconic hero, Kogoro Akechi, whose influence can be seen in novels, manga, films, and videogames across Japan and a booming scene that now enjoys translations into English and beyond. This popular form has inspired many notable films since; Hiroshi Nishitani's adaption of Keigo Higashino's Suspect X, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Takeshi Miike's Laplace's Witch among recent hits.

Like many things in Japanese cinema, though, all things lead back to Kurosawa; whilst overshadowed by his Jidaigeki films in the west, in Japan, his noirish detective tales are just as prominent, such as Stray Dog (1949) and The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Yet, Kurosawa's best detective film remains High and Low (1963) loosely adapting King's Ransom, a pulp novel by American Ed McBain, and starring his long-time muse, Toshiro Mifune, in which a wealthy businessman, Gondo (Mifune), on the verge of taking over the shoe company he is an executive for, is confronted by the kidnap of a child, and who must choose between their life, and his personal ambition, whilst the police race to find the culprit.

By 1963, Kurosawa was a veteran, not only of film, with the majority of his most famous samurai films-Seven Samurai, Rashomon and Yojimbo-behind him, but also of film noir. Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog in particular feel like precursors to High and Low, socially aware cinema dominated by the figure of Mifune as yakuza footsoldier coming to terms with his mortality in the former, and newly promoted homicide detective on the hunt for his stolen gun in the latter. Both have much to say about the Japan that hems in at every edge; Angel considers the corruption the Yakuza have sown at the heart of a nation recovering from war, Dog both the loss of innocence of the younger generation, and their increasing political militancy.

What is immediately apparent comparing Kurosawa's four noirs is how much Japan has changed between even Stray Dog and The Bad Sleep Well; the transformation is even more apparent by the time you reach High And Low; Mifune's hero is not a cop or a gangster, but a captain of industry, introduced in his spacious hillside home remonstrating with his fellow executives that they should stick to the luxury shoes that their company has become known for rather than the cheap ones one of the battling factions inside the company wish to market. Unseen, and unremarked upon for much of the film, Japan has become a booming economy, with much of the plot of the film shows both visually and socially how consumerism and the boom of the late 1950s has shaped the country, from bullet trains to personal cars, and the upcoming Olympics..

From here, Kurosawa's skill in pacing, and in building and releasing tension, turns the film on its head in mere minutes; no sooner have Gondo's colleagues left than he has revealed to his wife, Reiko (Kyōko Kagawa) and chauffeur, Aoki, (Yutaka Sada) that he has far more stock in the company that he has let on, and that he is preparing for a takeover.. No sooner has this been revealed, than the phone rings; the voice on the other end of the phone, unseen for much of the film (Tsutomu Yamazaki), claims to have kidnapped Gondo's son, and demands a thirty-million yen ransom. Events escalate from here, with the arrival of detective Inspector Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) and his team, and the revelation that it is Aoki's son, Shinichi, that has been kidnapped.

 Reluctant to pay for the ransom for the child of his chauffeur, the film accelerates from here, in two directions. First, Kurosawa presents a superbly observed detective tale that, as the film follows the hunt for the suspect, before and after the ransom is eventually paid, presents every stage of their reasoning, every single thing they have discovered, from the likely telephone box that the suspect calls from, with a vantage point of the Gondo house, high on a hill, to uncovering, half-hidden in the background, the sound of one particular tram line. Like a camera lens zooming in, Kurosawa may have Tokura front and centre of these discoveries, but it is collective good detective work that helps them zero in on the kidnapper.

Against this, Kurosawa once more uses the noir to consider social ills; from the very moment that Gondo, and then the (at this point unseen) kidnapper realises that he has the wrong child, the sequences set in the luxurious Gondo household take on an unsettling atmosphere, an unspoken consideration as to whether the child of his chauffeur, a child of a lower social rank, is worth the financial burden. Whilst Gondo's conscience later catches up with him, there are several sequences in which Shinichi's father remonstrates with him that he must remember the minute details of his kidnappers in order to repay the money he has cost his father's employer; a bleak sense that the Japanese economic boom has left the country less equal than before.

It is this inequality, and the rage of some in Japan against those in positions of power that ultimately drives the kidnapper-later in the film, beyond the glittering, and highly Americanised nightlife, beyond the bullet trains and cars, we see the rough accommodation he lives in, and the backstreets of the working class areas; Japan's economic miracle has not reached down the hill from where Gondo lives. Later still, we find that the kidnapper himself preys upon addicts, using them to do much of the work of the abuduction; like everyone else, the kidnapper is part of an ever more socially stratified Japan. It is this juxtaposition of the executive in the house on the hill, choosing to do the right thing, despite the cost to his livelihood and ambition, and the man who seeks to ruin him, obsessed with what he lacks, together with the meticulous depiction of detective work at its most granular that make High and Low one of Kurosawa's best, if unfairly neglected in the West, works.

Rating: Must See

High and Low is available via streaming on the BFI Player via Amazon Prime, and on DVD from the BFI in the UK, and via streaming on Apple TV and on BluRay from Criterion in the US

Next week, we join Sidney Poitier's Virgil Tibbs in the Deep South, as we consider the detective film as social commentary in The Heat of the Night.

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