David Hast: Scott, have you seen High and Low or Stray Dog?
Scott Vander Werf: I've seen both of those films directed by Akira Kurosawa. I actually saw Stray Dog, which was made in 1949 years ago, 40 plus years ago, when I was in film school for the first time. And then more recently, I watched High and Low, which was directed, made in 1963. And they're both, as usual, great films. Akira Kurosawa has always been one of my favorite directors.
DH: Yes. And of course, Kurosawa is most famous for his Samurai movies, most of them starring Toshiro Mifune, but he made some great crime dramas.And Stray Dog, as you said, was 1949. That's right before he made his indisputable masterpieces. The next year was Rashomon, then he made Ikuru, and then he made The Seven Samurai, all in the 50s, and several others, but certainly these were his masterworks. Not all samurai films. Ikuru is set in present-day Japan. But Rashomon and Seven Samurai are period pieces, but he's less known for these crime dramas. So Stray Dog's right before that period and High and Low comes right after. High and Low is 1963.
SVW: And Stray Dog is really, when you watch it, you can tell that this is very soon after World War II. And of course, Japan was defeated and the dropping of the atomic bombs. you can see that it's...to the subtext is the Japanese society in Tokyo. It's an urban film dealing with the loss.
DH: Yeah, I think I read somewhere that it wascompared a little bit to Italian neorealist films. Certainly one thing they have in common is that they're both about countries that have been decimated by World War II.
SVW: And they both are films that where the camera is moving through the cities.
DH: Right. So Dre Dog is and they…I don't know if we mentioned they both also star Toshiro Mifune. Although when you see him in Stray Dog in 1949, you almost don't recognize him at first.
SVW: He's very young and he's very thin compared to like being a muscular samurai.
DH: Yeah, and he plays it very differently. Mifune, you know, as a samurai, of course, he could be serious in the role in something like Rashomon, but after a while he developed this persona which is partly funny and people enjoy it. When he does contemporary dramas, he's really, that's where you see the range of his acting. So part of it is he's just playing a detective. He's wearing a suit and a fedora and he's…he doesn't seem the same as in the samurai films. So Stray Dog is, is a simple story and he gets right into it. Mufune plays a rookie police detective and in the first scene he gets his service pistol pickpocketed on the subway. And the rest of the movie is him trying to track down this gun, aided by an older and more experienced cop played by the great Takashi Shimura, who is the lead in Okuru and the lead samurai in Seven Samurai. But what gives it an uh edgy spin is that Mifune is growing more and more desperate because whoever has his gun keeps committing crimes with it, including killing people.
SVW: And you also see the sort of Japanese uh idea of honor with the police department, the way that the police detectives are, he’s dishonored himself by allowing his weapon to be stolen.
DH: He tries to resign a couple times and then they even tell him, just matter of factly, you're working for half pay for the next three months.I think I loved it most, we're going to talk about High and Low next, which I think is the greater of the two crime movies.But I really loved uh Stray Dog as well because it's just terrifically energetic, highly visual filmmaking. In the early part of the movie, there's these long montage sequences with lots of double exposures and overlapping, and they look like they came right out of silent movies.I mean, Kurosawa is so visual that he's just telling the story with these images, and some of them are even really funny, too. Like, there's this part where he's trailing this woman, and he just...no matter where he goes, no matter where she goes, he's right behind her and she knows it, which reminded me of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. when he's learning to be a detective and he's trailing a guy. I think Kurosawa is even doing it for humorous effect too.
SVW: And also there's a Lebrinthian, like I said, traveling through the city, there's a Lebrinthian quality to the alleyways, the buildings, how the characters are moving throughout the urban landscape.
DH: It definitely has the visual style of film noir in parts. There's darker scenes and a noir feel to it. It also has a kind of Hitchcockian suspense feel to it. But most important, it's different than the Hollywood films. It's a Japanese film.
SVW: It definitely is a Japanese film. But also like...we were talking when we talked about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid being one of the films that sort of defined the modern era of the buddy film. This is also a film that you could say defines the buddy film in terms of detectives, because you have the older detective played by Shimura whobecomes the mentor to Mifune. But they also, they grow together. They become closer.
DH: Maybe unlike uh the buddy films,it's only played a little bit for humor here, it's mostly pretty serious and some pretty bad stuff happens. Should we talk about High and Low?
SVW: Yeah, High and Low, again, it's another noirish detective film, but quite different from Stray Dog.
DH: Yes, and as we speak here in the fall of 2025, it's just been, a remake has just been done and is in theaters now, directed by Spike Lee and starring Denzel Washington, called highest to lowest and curse. I was an inspiration for this film.
SVW: Actually It's an adaptation of Evan Hunter's novel King's Ransom and Evan Hunter was…that was his real name. He was a prolific detective and crime novel novelist. He also went under the name Ed McBain. So this was based on an American novel called King's Ransom.
DH: Side note, you know, it's funny because we may have talked about this in our previous episode where we did Hidden Fortress by Kurosawa, but to some extent, he was vilified in Japan. Like the Japanese critics criticized him and said, he's not Japanese enough. He's too influenced by the West. And yeah, he did a remake of Macbeth and he did Russian literature.And here you're saying this one is based on an American crime novel. Poor Kurosawa it was so unfair because he's one of the greatest filmmakers whoever lived and I'm sure by now they think that in Japan, but he was criticized a lot at the time.
SVW: He was and that was totally unfair and it's like, you sometimes as you've noted in the past, sometimes the critics are right and sometimes the audience is right and the critics are wrong.
DH: So anyway, High and Low uh isthis uh great crime thriller that's really different. It's basically broken into three parts. So, the first part, Ihesitate even to it the first act, I guess it is, but it's almost half the film, is this long set piece set in the big apartment of this businessman, played byToshiro Mifune, a shoe company executive.And at first it's just all about how he's trying to take over the company and competing with the others, but then all of a sudden they get this phone call and the person on the other end says, I've kidnapped your child and I want 30-million yen.But then it turns out that it's actually the child of his chauffeur who's been kidnapped and he has to decide now, do I pay the ransom? Because the money is so much that'll ruin all his plans for taking over the company.And there's a class sort of thing here because obviously the chauffeur is not from his class.
SVW: Well, not only that, but you see that his instant reaction when he finds out that his son has been kidnapped and he has this 30-million yen that he's going to be spending on his on taking over this businessand solidifying his control ofthe industry that
DH: We know he has the money.
SVW: We know he has the money and he has instantly said that he will pay the money. And then as soon as he finds out it's not his child, then he's conflicted and initially, after sleeping on it, he says, I'm not paying.
DH: Right. But then he does come around. So by the end, there's an evolution.
SVW: That was one of the things that's really great about the movie is to see. And it's done in a way, it's kind of subtle the way it goes from the beginning to the movie to the end, where he has a change.
DH: Right. And we learn something about him too, because first we think he's just another like upper class, you know, corporate executive trying to take over this company. But then for reasons we don't have to get into, there's this thing that requires someone to do some craft work, sewing and stuff on a suitcase or a briefcase. And then he gets out his tools and then we learn, oh, he started out making these shoes. He was an actual shoemaker and leather maker. He came from the working classes and worked his way up.
SVW: And he's also, at the beginning, he's...being challenged by the other people that are on the board who want to get him on their side in terms of taking over the company and he's wants quality, they just want to make money.
DH: Yeah, and then we partly see why when we see that he's an actual crafts person who can do this. So he decides he's gonna pay the ransom, but then the second act then it just switches completely and now it's like a police procedural. There's a lot of scenes in the police station, but then there's also scenes out on location.
SVW: And one of the things that I thought was great about this was where it like in stray dog, you have these two detectives that are out and you get to know these two characters or maybe it's just one detective in some films. The thing I thought was great about High and Low was that it's a whole department.You see, so even though there's, there's one of the detectives is kind of leading the investigation. You get all sorts of scenes with all these other detectives. You don't even know them as characters. They're just detectives.
DH: Right. And you get a kind of inside look at the way the Japanese police force works, which is very different than ours, much more organized, you know,at least how we picture it. And Toshiro Mofune, this is interesting too. He basically disappears from the movie for about 45 minutes while it's just focusing on the police. And then there's this fantastic scene on a train which rivals any of Hitchcock's thrilling scenes on trains where they have to pay the ransom.
SVW: And it's a whole choreography that goes from car to carand the detectives that are on the train are either using still photography or eight millimeter camerasto try and capture the image or images of whoever the kidnappers are.
DH: Yeah, I love that, their technology is an eight millimeter camera. And then the third part is this sort of descent into the underworld of Japanese crime and nightclubs andhow would you describe that?
SVW: Well, yeah, it would be the underbelly of Tokyo where the the drug addicts…and…you also get in and this is a theme in a lot of the the noir Japanese noir films of the50s the late 40s through the 60s isThe idea that you know, this is a defeated nation. They lost World War two and there's an American occupation there. And one of the sequences in High and Lowis when he, whenone of the characters goes into the…when the villain goes in to score drugs, it's in a nightclub that's filled with American soldiers.
DH: But then it's also got drug addicts and it's got this whole, I mean, in a way, you mentioned the Japanese noir, right? There was a sort of Japanese new wave that happened really simultaneously with the French new wave. So we're talking late fifties into the sixties and they made a lot of these crime movies, Noir and Yakuza films and stuff. And I can imagine, I haven't read this, but I could picture this new generation of filmmakers and people saying, ah, Akira Kurosawa, you're from the previous generation. Yeah, you're great and everything, but you're the old man of cinema now.Look at where we've gone now with these edgy crime movies and stuff. And then this movie comes out and it’s very kind of Japanese and organized for the first part. And the police procedural is even...it's great, but it's not remarkable. But by the third part, it's like, I can make it as weird and edgy a film as any of these young guys.
SVW: And it does. The first sequence is almost like a play, where it takes place in this one room of this abode, where uh it's all on blocking the actors, how all the actors are framed within this one space, where there's just furniture and a stairway. And it's in front of a gigantic window that looks over the city, which is Yokohama, it's not Tokyo.And then it goes to the investigation where all of a sudden now it goes from the police department to different locations, and then you get the underbelly where the lighting changes.
DH: Yeah, now it's Film Noir. And I will point out something too, you're talking about this first piece and you're talking about how you see this, all the people in the shot. This was his first widescreen film. And it's black and white. So these shots that you like you're saying it's almost like a play. He's able to put like seven people in the frame and they're all doing stuff. They’re all looking around back and forth long takes without, without editing.
SVW: And they all have a react physically to, what's going on because the Mafuni character is sort of breaking down at different times and kind of showing himself to be dishonorable. And you see that in the way the detectives who are the other people in the room, howthey physically present themselves.
DH: So, High and Low, remade now as Highest to Lowest, but if you want to see the original, it's really...it's a really great and different Kurosawa kind of Kurosawa film.
SVW: When you think about Akira Kurosawa as Rashomon and Seven Samurai and Yojimbo and Throne of Blood, all great movies, of course his final films...Kaga Mousha, Ron, those are amazing.
DH: All samurai films…
SVW: All samurai films, but then these movies are equally as great.
DH: I agree.
SVW: Well, thanks for joining us.
DH: Thank you.
