'High and Low' Director: Akira Kurosawa (1963) BFI Blu-ray | Restoration | Japanese w/ English subtitles

Based on an Ed McBain novel, comes the gripping police thriller starring Kurosawa stalwart Toshirō Mifune.

Wealthy industrialist Kingo Gondo faces an agonising choice when a ruthless kidnapper, aiming to snatch his young son, takes the chauffeur’s boy by mistake – but still demands the ransom, leaving Gondo facing ruin if he pays up.

An anatomy of the inequalities in modern Japanese society, High and Low is a complex film noir, where the intense police hunt for the kidnapper is accompanied by penetrating insight into the kidnapper’s state of mind. Kurosawa’s virtuoso direction provides no easy answers, and in short, the police and the criminal as equally brutal, but nonetheless human.

Special features include:
- Newly recorded audio commentary by Japanese film expert Jasper Sharp
- Akira Kurosawa: It is Wonderful to Create – High and Low (2002, 38 mins): the director discusses how High and Low came to exist, and how specific sequences were filmed. Also features interviews with actors Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyoko Kagawa, Takeshi Kato, and Tatsuya Mihashi, as well as cameraman Takao Saito and Masaharu Ueda and script supervisor Teruyo Nogami