Mid-Career Kurosawa, both High and Low

"Red Beard"  

 Spike Lee, always shrewd about finding material, turned to a farflung source for his most recent release, Highest 2 Lowest. His inspiration for this contemporary crime story was a 1963 drama by Japanese master cineaste Akira Kurosawa, known as High and Low. (Its original Japanese title, Heaven and Hell, is certainly more vivid.) Kurosawa, who knew something about borrowing from the best, derived his plot from a 1959 thriller by Ed McBain (a pseudonym of Evan Hunter). Both films drew from McBain’s novel the notion of a wealthy, ambitious man secretly scheming to take over his industry, but being derailed along the way by the kidnapping of a child.

 I haven’t seen Lee’s film, which disappeared rather quickly from local theatres, but as a longtime Kurosawa fan I recently watched High and Low, which most critics strongly admire. This is not the visceral Kurosawa of jidaigeki (period costume dramas) like Rashomon, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo. Nor is it an elegant take on Shakespearean tragedy (see one of my very favorites, Throne of Blood, which is Kurosawa’s remarkable adaptation of Macbeth). High and Low is set in present-day Yokohama, where its central character (Toshiro Mifune, of course) is a successful manufacturer of women’s shoes. (The Spike Lee version makes him a record exec, which is certainly a cooler profession.) A Japanese bullet train plays an important role in Kurosawa’s plot, and the kidnapper also has drug-dealing on his résumé, preying on immigrant communities. 

 High and Low (which spends most of its first half in the main character’s hilltop mansion) seems static and talky at times, but the tension nicely ramps up, and the ending (which apparently Lee doesn’t copy) is thematically as well as dramatically powerful. Kurosawa didn’t plan this ending—in which Mifune and the kidnapper meet face to face under dramatic circumstances—until he saw the intensity of Tsutomu Yamazaki’s portrayal of an angry young criminal.

  For me, one of the intriguing aspects of High and Low is that it is followed in the Kurosawa canon by a film that couldn’t be more different. Red Beard (Akahige, 1965) returns Kurosawa to the Tokugawa period (early 19^th century), when clothing and manners were quite distinct from what they are now. It’s a medical drama (based on a book of Japanese stories) that easily calls to mind such all-American projects as a popular TV series of the era, Dr. Kildare. This long-running series, based on a 1938 Hollywood film, pits an idealistic young doctor (Richard Chamberlain) against a shrewd veteran of the profession (Raymond Massey). During its five-year run, Kildare evolves from intern into experienced physician, tempering his idealism with lessons learned on the job.

 Red Beard is not so very different, though it’s set in an era when medical knowledge is limited and traditional social values are hard to navigate. One distinction is that the film is named after the seasoned doctor, not the young one. The nickname Red Beard refers to the character played by Mifune (in his very last Kurosawa role). He’s a dynamo whose iconoclasm is not always appreciated, though he has a deep commitment to his patients and his profession. Into his clinic comes young Dr. Yasumoto (Yuzo Kayama, whom I well remember as a Japanese pop singer). Yasumoto is cocky about his intended future: he has studied modern medicine at a Dutch clinic in Nagasaki, and he now fully intends to take a cushy post in the court of a local lord. But gradually, under the tutelage of the irascible but brilliant Red Beard, he develop a higher regard for those in genuine need.

 The opinions expressed above are all mine, but for a fascinating in-depth assessment of the  filmmaker at mid-career I strongly recommend Donald Ritchie’s 1965 work, The Films of Akira Kurosawa.