Issue Date: August 3, 2008
High and Low, Akira Kurosawa's film adaptation
A corporate crime novelist takes on the 1963 classic about company men and class in postwar Japan.
The Plot
In "High and Low," acclaimed director Akira Kurosawa's film adaptation of "King's Ransom," Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), a quality-minded shoe company executive, learns his son has been kidnapped just as he's about to outmaneuver his rivals for control of the business. But the story takes a twist that causes a wrenching moral dilemma, even as detectives comb the city's underbelly in search of the perpetrator.
Our Insider
Joseph Finder, a former Harvard professor, has been called "the CEO of suspense." He has written several best-selling thrillers, including "Power Play." Many of his novels are set in the business world, in which corporations are not only exciting places to work, but they're also full of intrigue and back-stabbing ambition.
OVERVIEW "The film's well done. Several scenes -- paying the ransom on the train, tracking the suspect in the nightclub -- are especially gripping. But the scenes where the cops investigate the kidnapping, although praised in their time, now seem old hat. Maybe because all the police procedures we see on TV dilute the original."
FOR OPENERS "I love how the film begins, in Gondo's living room, with the company's executives trying to outmaneuver each other. There's a claustrophobic feel to the scene. Gondo is presented as the executive who cares about making quality shoes, as opposed to the others, who want to make a quick buck with a fashionable but shoddy product. I love when he turns the tables on them and shows that he's not just earnest, but cunning, as well. It is, in thriller terms, a great reveal."
A ROOTING INTEREST "It's essential that the audience learns early on that Gondo worked his way up in the company. The same point was made in another kidnapping film, Ron Howard's "Ransom." In that, we learned early on that Mel Gibson, who played a Richard Branson-like airline owner, had worked his way up. Audiences don't like business executives. They'll root for lawyers. They'll root for doctors. But they don't like CEOs. You have to turn them into regular guys to get the audience's sympathy."
THE MESSAGE "There's a lot going on here. Gondo has worked hard all his life, but now he has to pay the price for his ambition, at the hands of an embittered guy from the lower classes. His choice: Be a success, or do the right thing. The movie takes the position that you can't survive in business if you're moral, and if you are moral, you have to be prepared to give up everything."
-- Jamie Malanowski
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