Fortune and sons: High and Low

The English title given to Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 epic yet bracing kidnapping thriller and corporate critique is not accurate--he original translates as Heaven and Hell--but it’s better, or in any case appropriate on so many levels as to excuse its liberties. The film’s brilliantly rendered settings, from a shoe manufacturing executive’s deluxe, air-conditioned, ultra-Westernized mansion that looks down on Yokohama, to the industrial city’s dank, smoggy bed of low-lying refuse; from the cramped toilet of a bullet train speeding across a bridge to the anonymous grassy knoll far below to which briefcases of ransom money are tossed, High and Low shifts vertiginously between altitudes and class. Kurosawa himself was straddling “high” and “low” culture; he had previously adapted Shakespeare, Gorky and Dostoyevsky, was now working with considerably less elevated literary material: King’s Ransom, one of American author Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series of thrillers. And not one of the better ones.

Dramatic dichotomies abound in High and Low, right down to its stunning black and white (with one audacious exception) photography. Kurosawa was now three years into working with his own production company and was coming off a string of some of his finest and most enduringly popular middle-period films (Yojimbo among them); working hard to utilize the widescreen aspect ratio in as imaginative and fluent a manner possible, he had begun to forge what would become the signature camera style of the remainder of his career. He was at the top of his game, and could make such bold transitions with complete confidence. High and Low is one of his very best modern-dress films, and is now available on a gorgeous-looking, well-supplemented new blu-ray and DVD reissue from the Criterion Collection.

High and Low hits the ground running, with high tensions and thorny moral conundrums unfurling in its first scenes. Just as Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune, moustached, still terse and bullying, but with his characteristic bluster largely tucked into designer suits) is about to stake everything he owns--and he owns a lot--into clandestinely buying up shares so he can stage a take-over of the shoe company he works for, he gets a phone call that draws everything to a halt. His son has been kidnapped, and the ransom is very high. (Say goodbye to that corporate coup.) But soon his son enters the room--they kidnapped his chauffer’s kid by accident! Does Gondo still pay the enormous sum, even for a child that’s not his own? Is it worth throwing away his chance at advancement--perhaps throwing away everything? The immediate drama that unfolds, involving negotiations, elaborate arrangements and police involvement, is engrossing. And only about half of the movie. High and Low just keeps careening into different directions, and all the while it comments on Japan’s adoption of ruthless capitalism and peculiar ambivalence toward foreign influence.

Irreconcilable differences: Rashomon

It gushes off the edges, crashes through the holes where the roof has fallen in, stabs into the puddles and washes across the whole scene in great silvery sheets. The torrential rain at the start of Rashomon (1950) feels nearly apocalyptic, and the grandiose wreck of a city gate where it all takes place does nothing to break up the forbidding gloom. A young priest (Minoru Chiaki) and a middle-aged woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) take shelter there, seated together, not conversing, though through those thick lips encircled by an unkempt beard the woodcutter keeps muttering “I don’t understand…” A third man (Kichijiro Ueda), some guy just trying to get out of the downpour, barges in, starts a fire, gets them talking. He wants to hear a good story, and winds up with four of them, all variations on the same event, none of them matching up. That’s Rashomon, a film so persuasive in its perplexity it’s become an adjective. It won an Oscar, and the Golden Lion at Venice. It introduced Akira Kurosawa to the world—the West especially—and the world watched in fascination despite the film’s refusal to elucidate its central mysteries. It ensured us that our memories are incompatible, but through the movies at least each of them could be true for the time it takes to tell them.

Rashomon has been circulating in a newly restored print. It hits Metro Cinema this coming weekend, a place where Kurosawa’s oeuvre has always found a welcome home over the years and hopefully will for years to come. I’ve seen it more times than almost any other film, and its singular mood never fails to captivate me. An inspired amalgamation of two short stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (‘Rashomon’ and ‘In a Grove’), the narrative is a sort of labyrinth, a web of flashbacks within flashbacks, unreliable narrators having their individual narratives re-told by other, only slightly more reliable narrators. Yet it’s terribly entertaining, even while confusing the hell out of you.

So the woodcutter journeys deep into a sun-dappled grove. Just how deep we get a strong sense of from the multitude of angles and compositions granted us by Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who seemed to prowl through the trees and shrubs and even pointed the camera straight at the sun, a move which dazzled all his contemporaries anxious to find rules to break. Somewhere in this grove the woodcutter finds a lady’s hat, and then a dead body. There’s a trial, where a judge never seen or heard lets elicits testimonies from those connected to the incident, including the alleged killer, a known bandit (Toshiro Mifune, first seen staring into the clouds like a sick animal), the wife of the dead man (Machiko Kyo), and, in an especially chilling sequence, the dead man himself (Masayuki Mori), speaking through a medium and giving no comforting reports from the afterlife. The bandit meets the couple in the woods, tricks the husband, ties him up, and ravishes the wife. This much is basically clear. But what were the circumstances of the husband’s death? A fight? A killing? A suicide?

The performances are each compelling, varying wildly in tone—Mifune almost hysterical in his braggadocio; Kyo wounded, maybe conniving, sliding seamlessly between femme fatale and helpless victim; Mori stoic, pathetic, and in death harrowingly lonely—but united in their synchronized ambiguity. A fourth variation is given that might resolve the contradictions, but even this becomes suspect. The cry of an abandoned baby eventually brings a close to the string of irresolvable storytelling. Some find the baby’s eleventh-hour intervention sentimental, but it strikes me above all as Kurosawa’s way of imparting that life simply goes on, even when the only thing certain is infinite uncertainty. It finally doesn’t matter to us what really happened in the grove that day, and how justice is finally meted out isn’t even mentioned. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in the collective crannies of each of the stories. Everyone has their reasons for telling what they do, so it’s hard to say who to should trust. But if I had to, I’d put my money on the dead man.

I Live in Fear: Kurosawa's underrated portrait of a country with better reason to worry than most

Another forgotten work by one of the great auteurs is Akira Kurosawa’s 1955 troubled social portrait I Live in Fear, now available in Eclipse’s Postwar Kurosawa box. As is often the case with Kurosawa, the film has been grossly underrated over the years on account of its didacticism –as though earnestness alone can kill a movie with otherwise compelling, dynamic, chilling and even touching qualities. I propose that I Live in Fear is actually something quite special, rich in atmosphere and in certain regards as revealing of the mood of the mid-50s as, say, Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life or Rebel Without a Cause, films that also feature familial disintegration in a milieu of modernity and progress, as well as Cold War apocalyptic paranoia.

Elderly patriarch Kiichi Nakajima, portrayed by a heavily made-up, yet surprisingly effective Toshiro Mifune, is so consumed with anxiety over the seemingly inevitable nuclear holocaust that he’s resolved to move his entire clan –mistresses and illegitimate kids included– to a farm in Brazil, which he considers to be the safest possible locale to avoid fallout or direct attack. More concerned with the destiny of Kiichi’s finances than with the mortal destiny of Japan, the majority of his kin attempt to have a local court deem Kiichi incompetent and thus unfit to invest the family’s collective wealth in this venture that almost none want part of. As it becomes uncomfortably obvious that those pursuing the claim are chiefly concerned with their inheritance, the explosive Kiichi, whose convictions are as well-intentioned as they are impractical, wins the sympathies of one of his jurors, a dentist portrayed by Takashi Shimura, once again playing the reasonable counterpart to Mifune’s unruly protagonist. (The more I watch Shimura in these roles, the more he comes to resemble a Japanese Morgan Freeman. He’s got that aura of wisdom and kindness, yet can readily possess a daunting edge.)

Though sections are admittedly excessively talky, there are numerous scenes in I Live in Fear that, in their blend of sinuous camerawork, striking composition and percolating tension, deserve alignment with Kurosawa’s finest moments. In one, hot wind blows the pages of a book, while streetcars boom along the avenue outside: this “spooky weather,” attributed to H-bomb testing at sea, creates an unnerving air around Kiinchi as he cradles an infant grandchild while a son-in-law, drink in hand, casually goes on about the effects of radiation and the latest research into the ongoing trauma in Hiroshima.

The transfer on Eclipse’s no-frills disc is very good, and I’m grateful to finally have the film available on DVD. My only regret is that Criterion didn’t hold out for a more prestige-packaged release, because Japanese cinema expert Donald Ritchie would likely have provided a stellar commentary track.

Drinking, fighting and redemption round the toxic sump: Drunken Angel on DVD

I can think of few filmmakers whose very name holds the same promise of a great time like Akira Kurosawa’s. I can sit down to watch virtually any of Kurosawa’s films, whatever niggling individual flaws each might possess, and feel confident that I’m about to be treated to all the fundamental things that make movie-watching rewarding, to be entertained in the highest yet broadest sense of that troublesome term.

Yet with every Kurosawa film, no matter how ingeniously crafted, there’s always at least one moment that seems to have wriggled away from the dictates of sheer craft, something that breathes, that betrays ostensible perfection, that has funk. These more spontaneous moments make the films better, setting the obvious gems of technical precision and good taste in striking relief, pushing them up from the ranks of the very good to the singularly great. In Rashomon (1950), there’s the inordinate amount of time spent hiking through the woods with the woodcutter, as though the sheer pleasure of those woods deserves its own little movie. In Yojimbo (61) there’s that image of the dramatic mountain offset by Toshiro Mifune’s ronin protagonist ambling into frame not to strike a heroic pose but to yawn and scratch the back of his head –and that’s the opening of the movie!

Newly released on DVD by Criterion, Drunken Angel (48) was the first film Kurosawa felt he could truly call his own. It also happened to be his first collaboration with Mifune, the actor that will forever be associated with Kurosawa’s cinema. Though Drunken Angel is keenly focused on the uneasy friendship between a tippling doctor and a dying gangster, the sort of narrative detours mentioned above are already finding their home in the eager-to-impress young director’s palate. The film trades in brawling, in crime, in seedy ghettos, mafia-rule, drinking and prostitution, and pays off with every one of these elements. But many of the things that makes this more than just a taut, well-made populist film are its playful insertions of incidental moments most other directors would likely cut out, such as when the doctor makes repeated attempts to do nothing more than prop open a door, or when the restless gangster ostentatiously wiggles his ass to a rousing song (with lyrics by Kurosawa!) performed in a dance hall.

Central to Drunken Angel is a sprawling sump into which locals toss their refuse, a toxic bog crawling with disease and clearly representing the morass of post-war Tokyo, a city in search of some new sense of self but mired in chaos and cynicism. The titular doctor –played with caustic appeal the other actor most associated with Kurosawa, Takashi Shimura– lives and works around this sump, battling all the filth rising from it. Though his drinking and bitter mood convey his unhappiness with the state of things, his deep-seated optimism can be located in his desire to cure even the most resistant patients, such as the arrogant young yakuza, played by Mifune, who the doctor discovers has tuberculosis. Their relationship is fraught with conflict –and the guys literally fist fight all the time– yet perhaps because of these conflicts, their attempts to understand each other is that much more profound, and fun.

Though Kurosawa had yet to distinguish all the elements of his formal style, the film features numerous inspired set-pieces, such as that dance hall scene and a tremendous climatic fight involving white paint, a device that imbues the action with layers of meaning even as it thrills us, finally resolving in a traveling shot that moves elegantly from Mifune’s collapsed figure and back out into the neighbourhood swamp. These scenes are further enriched when you later listen to Donald Richie’s enormously interesting audio commentary, which benefits not only from Richie’s position as the West’s foremost representative of Japanese cinema but from the fact that he was actually on set during the film’s making.

The book accompanying Drunken Angel, handsomely illustrated with inky impressions of the film’s imagery by somebody called Jock, features a short essay by cultural historian Ian Buruma that helps flesh out the dramatic polarities of post-war Japanese life, placing special emphasis on the idea of the nation’s inability to find an individual or institution upon which to place blame for its defeat, shame and humiliation, and, especially intriguingly, on the lineage between soldiers and yakuza.

Buruma’s essay is followed by two superb excerpts from Kurosawa’s Something Like an Autobiography, in which he describes the varied elements that fed into the development of the film and more generally on the phenomena of Mifune. But anyone even slightly interested in Kurosawa should do themselves a huge favour and just go out and get the whole book, which, with its breezy, humble, anecdotal tone, is among the best memoirs on life in the film industry ever written.