By Brian Hu
The Criterion Collection re-issues Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece of style and suspense, High and Low.
Many will disagree, but High and Low is for my money Akira Kurosawa's greatest film. As a whole, the film's pacing is uneven, thanks to a major tonal shift in the second half of the film. Ideologically, the celebration of police ingenuity and the machinations of justice are a little too simplistic -- further underscored by the film's original Japanese teaser (included in the Criterion Collection's new DVD re-release), which touts the film for helping to increase prison sentences for kidnappers. But as a morality tale, visual artifact, and suspense-thriller, High and Low is unparalleled not just in the Kurosawa canon but in all of cinema.
As any good detective story does, High and Low unfolds as a succession of revelations. The clues and surprises come fast and hard, with about as much sentiment as a pulp novel. (In fact, the film is based on Ed McBain's King's Ransom.) Throughout its 2 ½ hour duration, the film never lets up, nor fails to surprise. The first 55 minutes in particular are a masterpiece in gradually revealing information in the service of suspense. In the service of enticing the reader, I will only reveal the first 20 minutes.
Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) is an idealistic though relentless capitalist, plotting to buy enough shares to take over the company he's worked at all his life. To do so, he's mortgaged everything he owns, including the high-rise apartment where he, his wife, and his son Jun live. One afternoon, he finalizes his travel plans to Osaka, where he will submit his down payment on company stocks, while his son and another boy play cops and robbers in another room. Gondo's chauffeur arrives, and they prepare to leave for the airport when the phone rings. A mysterious voice brings an ominous message: Gondo's son has been kidnapped. The voice demands an exorbitant amount of money and warns Gondo against calling the police. After hanging up the phone, Gondo consoles his frantic wife and nervously readies his life savings, which until a few moments earlier was meant to buy out his company. And then without warning, Jun shows up, confused by all the frenzy. The phone rings: the kidnapper got the wrong boy. They got the chauffeur's son.
Relieved, Gondo's sense of desperation disappears. Against the kidnapper's warning, he calls the cops, and considers not paying the ransom. Meanwhile, the chauffeur remains quiet, appearing a loyal servant on the outside but surely a frantic father on the inside. The film shifts into a devastating morality tale about class privilege. Should the ambitious businessman give up everything he owns to save his chauffeur's son? Does the chauffeur ask his boss to sacrifice the well-being of his entire family?
In Kurosawa's hands, these ethical ruminations are intensified by some of the most stimulating character blocking and mise-en-scène in the history of cinema. The dramatic circumstances are excruciatingly tense already, but Kurosawa's framings highlight the hesitations and interactions between Gondo, his family, his chauffeur, and the police. Through deep-focus, Tohoscope long takes, Kurosawa captures the emotional and ethical trauma of men cramped in a small space (the entire hour takes place in a living room) but who are too nervous and too embarrassed to connect with each other. Like Hong Sang-soo and Cristian Mungiu decades later, Kurosawa uses widescreen and the long take to keep our eyes shifting throughout the frame, nervously jumping from face to face, soaking up the awkwardness between men who are unable to look each in the eye for fear of revealing their inner selfishness -- or worse yet, of letting the sight of others' suffering turn one soft and allowing sympathy to ruin one's selfish plans.
For instance, in the above film still, Kurosawa frames the characters as they try to figure out what to do about the chauffeur's kidnapped son. Gondo (in the center back, in a white jacket) cannot bear to show his face; the chauffeur (at the far right) silently keeps his head down while nervously clutching some fabric; Gondo's wife (far left) knows what's right but cannot act on it for fear of hurting her family; her son (in her arms) can't bear to look up, for he's happy he's safe but guiltily knows that it should have been his life in danger; Gondo's right-hand man (farthest man standing on the left) can't look at his boss but can't look away, as he's caught between his conscience, his loyalty, and his company; and the four policemen (literally trapped in the middle) can't afford to intervene in the crossfire so they can only look off in random directions, contemplating the next move. If we extend each character's eyelines, we can imagine them as rays which stray offscreen and never meet. As the scene unfolds, every minute movement -- a raise of a chin, a turn of a head -- leads to awkward shuffling by everyone else, looking but not looking, trying to keep their dirtied conscience out of view.
Every movement is calculated precisely. As we see in the 37-minute documentary on the making of the film, as well as Donald Richie's notes from the set of the film in the Criterion DVD's booklet, Kurosawa plotted every angle and framing such that each character's movements contribute to a sense of paranoia, guilt, and claustrophobia. All Gondo wants is to open the high-rise windows and breathe the outside air, as we see him do at the beginning of the film. But he can't; the kidnapper might see the cops in the apartment.
Needless to say, for such a scene to work, a clean print source is essential. Deep focus photography requires picture sharpness to retain the details, while an uncropped image is essential for retaining the sense of balance and completeness inherent in Kurosawa's carefully-composed Tohoscope framings. However, the 1998 DVD released by the Criterion Collection, though better than its Hong Kong Mei Ah counterpart, failed on both levels. In terms of sharpness, it initially looks fine. But it is a non-anamorphic disc, meaning that users with widescreen televisions need to zoom the image in to fill their displays, hurting the image quality. Meanwhile, the disc was noticeably cropped on the left and right, especially when compared to DVD versions of the film which came out in Australia and Britain.
Criterion's re-release of High and Low corrects both, to some extent. In terms of sharpness, this is probably the best the film will look until a Blu-ray version is released. The image is anamorphic and its deep blacks look crisp on my widescreen display. However, fans of the film are perplexed by the cropping. Yes, there is slightly more information on the left and right (as well as the bottom) of the frame, but not as much as on the British and Australian discs. In most scenes, the difference is miniscule and never gets in the way. But in shots like the aforementioned living room scene, where blocking is so precise, there is a danger for the framing to look slightly off. For instance, take a look at the comparisons on DVDBeaver, in particular capture #3, where cropping closely over the chauffeur's left arm seems to draw attention more to the police officers, rather than to the larger tableau of nervous gestures and glances, of which the chauffeur's are absolutely central.
Ultimately, this is a minor issue, but it's a mysterious one, especially given Criterion's usual meticulousness. Perhaps the problem will be corrected in a future Blu-ray release. And with the exception of Jacques Tati's Playtime, if there's anything in the Criterion catalog that demands higher resolution, it'd be Kurosawa's ‘scope films, which contain minor details that fill the frame, yet which already must be shrunk to fit a 16:9 television.
However, no improvement is needed on the 4.0 soundtrack mix, which according to Criterion, derives from the original 4-track stems. The result is a mix unlike any I'd heard before. Somehow, I assumed that it'd be a quadraphonic mix (left front, right front, left back, right back), which hadn't even been introduced yet in 1963. Instead, the audio (possibly from a Perspecta source) came from the front left, center, and right, as well as a surround track for the rears. The result is a sonic environment that's as deliberate and precise as the video. The rear speakers are for the most part un-utilized, except in outdoor scenes toward the end of the film, when the story slips into purgatory-like depths of the modern city (the Japanese title translates as “Heaven and Hell”) and atmosphere becomes absolutely essential.
In other words, as remarkable as it already is, High and Low really shines with the right screening environment and the correct transfer, for which Criterion's DVD re-release comes the closest. Kurosawa's themes (class conflict, drug culture, compassion, parenting, the media, corporate culture) are conveyed through dense visual compositions and elaborate audio design, which includes not just sound effects, but also a spare, though jarringly eerie, musical score. Criterion's latest is the best edition we're going to get for a while. And Kurosawa's best film deserves the best.
Published: Friday, July 25, 2008
