Reviews

Hard to know what this film is trying to be... farce, thriller, kitchen-sink drama..? The plot is so improbable and the characters so caricatured that you are really not sure whether you are expected to laugh or not. Black-and-white scenes of London in 1960, and the jazz score, are diverting, but not really enough to compel. Dennis Price and William Hartnell are always watchable, but the script does not make the most of their considerable palette of acting skill. The ending, in which the anti-heroes are killed in what appears to be poetic justice, seems out of character with the rest of the film: suddenly a strong moral tone is injected where none existed before.

It's been mentioned several times that the film High and Low is based on the Ed McBain novel 'King's Ransom'. I've recently read the book, and watched the film again, so I thought I would write something about the specific differences and similarities between the two. In fact, they start out almost identically, but then veer quite widely apart.

In both, we have the rich, self-made, hard-charging shoe company executive ('Douglas King' vs. 'Kingo Gondo') who, because of a conflict with other directors of his firm, engineers a behind-the-scenes financial coup in which he corners a majority interest in the company's shares. In order to do this, he has had to secretly borrow and mortgage himself to the hilt --- almost every penny he has is invested in this bold bid for power. At the moment of consummation, however, he receives a telephone call saying his son has been kidnapped, in response to which he immediately pledges the money he has just accumulated, knowing full-well it means personal ruin for him. In both stories, it turns out the kidnapper has snatched the wrong boy, taking the chauffeur's son instead. In both, King/Gondo's first reaction is relief, followed by a furious refusal to pay. And in both, it is his wife who functions as the voice of conscience, telling him that even though it is not his son, he still must pay.

But from this point on we start to see quite marked differences.

In King's Ransom, there is a trio of kidnappers, two men and a woman --- low-life semi-professional criminals who have teamed up and committed the crime solely for the money: they have no particular personal grudge against King. In High and Low, by contrast, the crime is committed by a pathological loner, a medical intern at a nearby hospital, who becomes obsessed with the class differences which keep him in his low-paid and squalid 'hell', while Mr Gondo lives in the splendor and comfort of his 'heavenly' mansion on the hills above. This kidnapper, Takeuchi, does have two accomplices, but they are completely nameless and faceless tools: people he uses for his purposes, then discards --- both are heroin addicts he has picked up off the streets of Yokohama, and, using his medical knowledge and access to heroin, arranges their death by overdose after their work is done.

In King's Ransom, Douglas King resolutely refuses to pay the ransom, but instead helps the police catch the main kidnapper. The boy is released during this process, but only because the other kidnappers have quarrelled amongst themselves and given away their location. As a result, King is able to complete his stock transaction and win control of the shoe company, in effect having his cake and eating it too.

By contrast, in High and Low, Gondo reluctantly agrees to pay the ransom, thereby securing the safe release of the boy, but the kidnapper remains at large. The remainder of the film details the police detective work, unaided by Gondo, which leads to the arrest of the kidnapper (not before he kills off his accomplices, however). The fact that Gondo has paid the ransom leads to the failure of his stock deal, the collapse of his finances, eviction from his house, and the loss of his possessions.

There is a twist in the tail of both stories, but quite different in each case :

Despite the fact that Gondo is ruined, the police, through dogged detective work, recover most of his money and, with public sympathy, he is able to start again, opening his own small shoe business. In a sense, he is now 'his own man' in a way that he never was before. The kidnapper Takeuchi, on the other hand, is unrepentant, and goes to the gallows (for he is given the death penalty) mocking and cursing Gondo.

In King's Ransom, by comparison, it is strongly implied that King's refusal to pay the ransom means that his 'come-uppance' and self-reckoning are yet to come: that his cold and selfish view of the world will one day have to change. Ironically, it is one of the kidnappers --- the woman --- who has a moral conversion, displaying an admirable humanity in attempting to be kind to the kidnapped boy, trying to help him escape, and, in the end, intentionally betraying the whereabouts of the boy to the police. And as with Gondo, this moral conversion is rewarded : the kidnapped boy refuses to give evidence against the kidnapper who was kind to him, allowing her and her husband to escape across the border.

All in all, one would have to say that, despite being an adaptation, High and Low is the tighter, more polished, and more sophisticated rendering. The McBain story seems somewhat unbalanced and dated by comparison.

The film is notable in the series for being the only one in which Tora-san goes outside Japan. (But, parenthetically, why Vienna? It's a curious choice, being much less on the radar scope of Japanese travelers, especially in 1989, than, say, London, New York, Paris, or Rome --- possibly the Austrian Tourist Board provided some support for the film...).

The film includes some nice scenes of Vienna and its environs --- Schonbrunn Palace, Durnstein in the Wachau Valley, etc. But predictably, it's all lost on Tora-san, who spends much of his time in the hotel room, or getting mixed in with an organized tour of Japanese tourists.

By now everyone knows this film is about a sexually-obsessed woman who strangles and then cuts off her lover's willie (the extent to which her lover shared in the extremity of her obsession is somewhat debatable...). That notwithstanding, the film is well-acted, visually stylish, and manages to convey a genuine feeling for the passion which drove the characters. It's also succinct (at 96 minutes) and has some fabulous sex scenes.

As others have commented, the real-life case of 'Abe Sada' (Abe is the family name) was very well known in Japan, occurring as it did almost 40 years before Oshima made this film. There are at least two other cinematic versions of the events. If anything, reality was even a bit stranger than fiction: in the real-life case Abe was arrested whilst carrying around the severed member in her kimono sash. I saw a photograph of her once, taken just after her arrest: you have never seen a more haunted-looking woman.

The original Japanese title of the film is 'Ai no Corrida,' 'Ai' means 'love', but, interestingly, 'Corrida' is not a Japanese word at all: it's a Spanish word meaning 'dash' 'sprint' or 'spurt', and is most often used in the expression 'Corrida de Toros' -- i.e. bullfight -- strongly alluding to the brutal (and inevitable) death of the bull at the end. This puts quite a different complexion on the theme of the film than does the Western distributor's title of 'In the Realm of the Senses' which seems to imply sensual pleasure which has perhaps unintentionally got out of hand.

Oshima's stock-in-trade has always been the 'shocking' film, usually made with the aim of confronting 'bourgeois' sensibilities or an accepted view of society or history. In the 1960's they were more of the socio-political variety (e.g. 'The Sun's Burial,' 'Cruel Story of Youth'); but the success of this film firmly added the sexual element to his repertoire; you can see this continues even up to the recent film 'Gohatto.' In my mind, however, 'Ai no Corrida' is the only one of his films that really works.