Neatly coinciding with the digital release of Spike Lee's 2025 remake Highest 2 Lowest (read Mel's review here), the Criterion Collection has reissued spine #24 (!) in its third edition, now formatted in 4K UHD: Akira Kurosawa's 1963 epic of class-conscious crime, High and Low.
A few collector's notes before beginning: only the 4K disc in this package is new. The second disc in the 2-disc set is a re-pressing of Criterion's 2011 Blu-ray (meaning that the restoration on the Blu-ray is built from the 2008 2K master, not the 2024 4K). The Blu-ray contains all of the 2011 set's special features; the only new element produced for this release is the new 4K master, which appears on the UHD only.
If nothing else, it's a nice opportunity for side-by-side comparison of the Blu-ray edition against its newer restoration. The picture on the new 4K is appreciably neater, with more nuanced contrast and greatly improved space in the blacks for shadow detail.
It's also worth noting that the 4K of High and Low has not had HDR applied. It is available in Standard Dynamic Range only. Nonetheless, this is a lovely image, certainly the finest I've ever seen it. The film's sole, signature pop of colour -- a bright plume of pink smoke, indicating the kidnapper's location -- still wows.
Adapting from the 1959 crime novel King's Ransom by Ed McBain (a pen name for Salvatore Lombino who, under a different pen name, also wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's The Birds), Kurosawa's film has one of the most delectable setups in all cinema: a wealthy industrialist (Kingo Gondo, played by Toshiro Mifune), on the eve of a go-for-broke business deal that will either ruin him or make him even richer, is delivered a ransom demand against his young son... only to learn that it was his chauffeur's son, instead, who was kidnapped by mistake.
Kurosawa -- along with his screenplay collaborators Hideo Oguni, Ryūzō Kikushima, and Ejirō Hisaita -- cleaves his film neatly in two. The first half is very nearly a stage play, set entirely in Gondo's living room. We watch him as he stages his corporate coup, then learns of the kidnapping, and works with the police to attempt to outwit the kidnapper.
Following a bravura train sequence that breaks the film wide open and sees the ransom paid and the kidnapped boy freed, the second half of the film is a procedural: it tracks the police as they hunt the kidnapper through the hot, mean streets of Yokohama.
There's great specificity to Kurosawa's take on the class divides circa 1960s Japan, but it's depressingly difficult not to follow the commentary in High and Low to its more recent endpoint, as we stare down the barrel of profound wealth inequality in 2025. The Japanese title for the film -- Tongoku to Jigoku, literally "Heaven and Hell" -- is more direct as regards Kurosawa's conception here. Gondo looks down on mainstream Yokohama from above; we learn in the early sequences that he built himself up from nothing, and has no intention of being brought low by a kidnapping that doesn't even involve his family.
The streets of Yokohama, on the other hand, are brutishly hot, noisy, overcrowded... a "hell" to which we might lend Gondo some sympathy for his wealth-obsessed brain rot.
The first half of High and Low is rock-steady, a cunning morality play, and the question of whether Gondo will or won't pay the ransom is handled with tension and wit, along with some of the most gorgeous frames in the picture. A sequence late in the first half, where Gondo relents and sits upon the floor to use his old cobbler's tools to help the police, is sublime; earlier shots, as Gondo and his wife and his chauffeur all crowd the phone to hear the ransomer's demands, form a human triptych, underlining the way the scenario has thrust the titular high and low together.
The mansion sequences are rightly lauded for their staging and production: Kurosawa masterfully composes tableaux of six, seven, and even eight characters in perfectly balanced frames, while his team built identical sets for the Gondo mansion, one overlooking the actual Yokohama (for daytime shots that required views out the window), and one on a soundstage with an elaborate nightscape created in miniature beyond those same windows.
In the second half, this rigid formalism falls away and Kurosawa begins to play with kinetic editing and a roving camera as the gigantic police investigation gets underway. The sheer scale of the investigation is itself kind of hilarious, and can be read as commenting on the asymmetrical effort placed by "public servants" on crimes against the rich and famous, versus anyone else. Underlining the point: Gondo's public image only improves, following his "noble sacrifice" of his fortune and career to save an unrelated child.
Kurosawa's picture of the "low" components of society sometimes veers towards the cartoonish when addressed explicitly -- his angsty take on The Lower Depths was made only six years prior, and feels repeated here. The director also doesn't handle elements of addiction and abuse particularly well, and the second half of the film is so procedure- and detail-obsessed that it begins to feel baggy.
This is compensated for somewhat by Kenjiro Ishiyama's winsome performance as Inspector "Bosun" Taguchi, a grizzled veteran of the force who recalls Takashi Shimura's older cop in Stray Dog, or Shimura again in Seven Samurai. Ko Kimura also shines as Bosun's junior partner, who doggedly pursues the kidnapper.
As mentioned above, the special features in the new package are all repurposed from the DVD and Blu-ray editions of High and Low. Stephen Prince gives a great commentary, and another chapter of Toho Masterworks' Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful To Create is presented. One wonders if, sooner or later, Criterion will just box up that entire series on its own... or put all of the episodes in sequence on the Criterion Channel. They should! I'd love to binge them.