This blog began in 1997 as a single news page called Nucelus. In 2005, during a long wait to move into a new house, I decided to learn some php and MySQL and write my own blogging system, which became inkyBlog and which now powers this, my own Webbledegook blog.
Thank you to my brother, Murray Ewing, for help with some of the more challenging aspects!
The following is an article I wrote on High and Low last October and included in my 50'zine - copies still available.
Akira Kurosawa is my favourite director, but which is his best film? I vacillate between Seven Samurai, Hidden Fortress, Ikiru and High & Low, but High & Low might just edge it. Released in 1963, it is, for me, almost perfect cinema. The story is an adaptation of Ed McBain's King's Ransom (1959), the story of a shoe company executive who at first believes his son has been kidnapped and is willing to lose his hard-won fortune to save him, until he learns that it's his chauffeur's son who has been kidnapped by mistake - and he refuses to pay.
The book and the film part ways in a number of places. Kurosawa takes McBain's interesting moral dilemma, but rather forced set-up, and gives it a humanist spin, making it more exciting, logical, dynamic and overall more satisfying. Where McBain's Doug King refuses to pay and takes fake money to get the boy back, Kurosawa's Kingo Gondo (fantastically portrayed by Toshiro Mifune) finally relents and sacrifices almost everything he has to save another man's child. The roller-coaster of emotions is palpable through a number of starkly memorable scenes - the subdued chauffeur clutching his only child's jumper, Gondo sitting down to work with his old tool bag as the police rise from their seats with dawning respect, the discovery of the pink smoke over the city, and the shocking seediness of Yokohama's ghetto and underbelly.
The first half of the film is entirely set in the high-up house of Gondo, almost like a theatrical production - but the scene setting, composition and tension are masterfully presented. The action cuts suddenly to a speeding express train - a car in the book - after being still for so long (not that we realised) the jolting movement of camera and transport is exhilarating. Then the second half of the film commences - a solid police procedural set against the backdrop of Gondo, the destroyed but now revered man, and Takeuchi, the kidnapper, already in hell and pursued further and further into it. The Japanese title, Tengoku to Jigoku, translates more accurately as Heaven & Hell.
The film included four of Kurosawa's leading men - the unparalleled Mifune as Gondo, Nakadai as the lead investigator, with smaller roles for the great Shimura as the Section Chief, and Fujita, Kurosawa's first star, as the Police manager.
The book has King chase and fight the kidnapper, not to save the boy, but more out of anger at his own near-ruin. In Kurosawa's intense ending, the reflected faces of hero and villain merge, separated by fortune perhaps, but more - the film suggests - by the choices they made, the choice to do good or to do evil. High & Low is cinema storytelling at its finest.
