High and Low

High and Low

Synopsis

Based on crime writer Ed McBain's detective novel King's Ransom, High And Low is a gripping police thriller starring Kurosawa regular, Toshiro Mifune. Wealthy industrialist Kingo Gondo (Mifune) faces an agonising choice when a ruthless kidnapper, aiming to snatch his young son, takes the chauffeur's boy by mistake – but still demands the ransom. Gondo, engaged in a precarious scheme to seize control of the shoe company he works for, faces ruin if he pays up. Although the film is based on the McBain novel, Kurosawa essentially takes the plot outline – a kidnapping that goes wrong and the moral dilemma it poses – and, with his scriptwriters, turns it into something more ambiguous and complex; an anatomy of the inequalities in modern Japanese society.