Reel Rundown: While not quite faithful to novel, ‘High and Low’ continues to be one of Kurosawa’s greatests

Spike Lee is hardly the first movie director to remake one of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s films. A quick look online shows that more than two dozen have been remade, some at least twice – Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece “Seven Samurai” among them.

Lee’s contribution is “Highest 2 Lowest,” his adaptation of the 1959 Ed McBain novel “King’s Ransom,” which also was the source for Kurosawa’s 1963 film “High and Low.” Given that Lee’s film is now playing theatrically, it’s worth taking another look at Kurosawa’s.

(“High and Low” is streaming through several outlets, including Amazon Prime, HBO Max and the Criterion Channel)

“High and Low” stars Toshiro Mifune as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy executive at a Yokohama-based shoe company. Tired of fighting other company officials who value profit over quality, Gondo begins a risky financial maneuver to gain control of the business.

But his efforts get interrupted when he receives a phone call telling him his son has been kidnapped. Furthermore, he is told that unless he pays a substantial sum as ransom, his son will die.

Thus begins an unfolding saga, set mostly in a single room, that takes up a full hour of the film’s 2-hour-and-23-minute running time. Led by the chief detective (Tatsuya Nakadai), the city police department becomes involved. But the film’s main emphasis is Gondo.

The pertinent question that Kurosawa contemplates is whether Gondo will, or even should, pay the ransom. Doing so will ruin him financially. The situation becomes even more morally problematic when it turns out that the kidnapper mistakenly took the son of a longtime employee.

Yet the kidnapper remains adamant: Gondo must pay or the boy dies. Now the decision facing Gondo is even more excruciating: Is he is willing to sacrifice everything to save someone who isn’t a blood relative?

Kurosawa, who co-wrote the screenplay, eventually resolves that issue. When he does, “High and Low” thematically becomes less of a study in morality and more of a straightforward police procedural with – as a sign of the times in which the film was made – the hard-working officers being treated with all due respect.

In terms of the actual production, Kurosawa opens things up in the second hour-plus. Moving out into the city itself, the police gradually follow one clue after the next in an effort not just to save the boy but to also recover the ransom money, thereby saving Gondo from total ruin.

I can’t claim to understand the full meaning of what Kurosawa has put on the screen, at least in terms of what it might have meant to post-war Japanese audiences. Yet a clue rests in the original Japanese title, which translates as “Heaven and Hell” and suggests the divide between Japan’s haves and have-nots.

The most obvious reference applies both to Gondo’s house, a mansion that sits on a hill overlooking the city, and to his rich lifestyle. This is in dire contrast to the kidnapper (Tsutomu Yamazaki), who lives in the seedy village below.

It’s easier to appreciate the movie as a perfect example of Kurosawa’s craft with a camera. Along with how the first half emphasizes the acting skills of the great Mifune, Kurosawa shows masterful use of limited space.

The second half, conversely, moves from one location to the next and is marked by several brilliantly framed scenes, many of which key on one striking face after the next. All of this is rendered in brilliant black and white, especially a pair of sequences set in a dance club and a drug den.

“High and Low” may be less faithful to Hunter’s novel than what Lee has created. That said, it remains one of Kurosawa’s greatest achievements, a film that – in the words of the critic Jay Carr – “reverberates with insights not only on the contemporary world but on Kurosawa’s world as well.”