A Yen for Yen

High and Low. Japan's Akira Kurosawa is an eclectic film genius who has borrowed plots from such classic sources as Shakespeare, Gorky and the Hollywood western. This time, he takes a routine American thriller by Ed McBain (pseudonym for Evan Hunter, author of The Blackboard Jungle) and proves that he needs neither sex nor samurai to set the screen crackling with excitement. Basically hackneyed, and at times impausible, High and Low is a Kurosawa triumph of man over matter.

"I made this picture to point up the laxity of Japanese kidnaping laws," Kurosawa says. Japanese law makes kidnaping a popular crime, since a conviction brings a sentence of only one to ten years if the victim is returned unharmed. But the film is no mere polemic. The story begins with a business conclave in a luxurious home perched on a hilltop high above the smoking slums of Yokohama. While a shoe company executive named Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) struggles with his unprincipled colleagues in a last-ditch fight for control of the firm, a kidnaper strikes. Intending to seize Gondo's young son, he nabs the chauffeur's boy by mistake. Swiftly, the issues narrow to meaningful dimensions: Gondo faces ruin unless he uses his last 50 million yen (approximately $139,000) to consummate a secret stock purchase. Must he, now, give up 30 million yen and a lifetime of work to save another man's son? Bristling at the center of this moral dilemma, Actor Mifune delivers a restrained performance that summarizes all the stresses of thwarted ambition.

To build suspense, Kurosawa keeps actors moving. The screen is alive with motion, choreographically precise and caught by his artist's eye in scene after scene of stunning composition. In one hypnotic interlude, the kidnaper, watching the house by longe-range telescope to detect police interference, telephones and orders the Gondos to open their curtains--and they stand helpless, gaping through the vastness of their picture window into the greater vastness of the city below. "O.K., I can see you now," says their tormentor. Later, Gondo and a squad of detectives board a train, and a brilliantly mounted ransom scene races by with all the blurred, whooshing impact of a head-on collision.

The drama loses pace only when the kidnaper's identity is learned. Instead of arresting the criminal, police follow him around interminably, wasting precious time in expressions of teahouse sympathy for Mr. Gondo, who has become a national hero and nearly gone bankrupt after getting the boot from National Shoes. But Kurosawa generates fresh energy as hunter and hunted make their way through the Yokohama underworld, and he finds flesh-and-blood truth in a final confrontation between Gondo and his enemy. The two men stare. Antithesis embodied, they are high and low--the man from the great glass house on the hill and the angry, anonymous underdog who loathes him from afar. "It is very interesting to make fortunate people unfortunate," the kidnaper sneers. "Hating you gave me some purpose in life."

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