the house on
the hill
by Douglas Messerli
Eijirō Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima,
Akira Kurosawa, and Hideo Oguni (screenplay, based, in part, on King’s Ransom by Ed McBain), Akira
Kurosawa (director)天国と地獄 (Tengoku to Jigoku) (High
and Low) / 1963
In Japanese Kurosawa’s film
translates literally as “Heaven and Hell,” two metaphysical positions that can
be seen to shift throughout the work, whereas the English language translation
of “High and Low” are formally set: the fashionable house on the hill where
Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) and his family live quite obviously representing a
“high” life, while the crowded slum in which the film’s villain, medical intern
Ginjirō Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamazaki) exists, revealing the sociological
underside of Japanese culture, most definitely the life of the low. Yet
Kurosawa’s seemingly bi-partite (in truth, it is more tri-partite) structure
sets up a number of reversals right from the start.
Gondo, his wife Reiko (Kyōko Kagawa),
and his young son, Jun, seemingly have all they might desire. As an executive
in the National Shoes company, Kondo has a personal secretary, Kawanishi
(Tatsuya Mihashi) and a live-in chauffeur, Aoki (Yutaka Sada), and a fabulous
view of the surrounding city. But, as the film quickly reveals, the world in
which he lives is about to be threatened. Other executives from the company
have paid him a visit to ask Gondo to join them in taking over the company from
its founder so that they might produce more cheaply made yet more fashionable
shoes. Gondo, however, rejects their offer: he would prefer the well-made shoes
the company currently produces were simply more stylish, although he knows the
profit will not be as substantial. The others see shoes as decorations, like a
hat, something purposely made to go out of style quickly, while Gondo believes
that quality will pay off in the long run. So, it appears, that Kurosawa has
set up his central figure as a man of moderation, an individual arguing for
customer satisfaction and permanence rather than simply basing the product on
money. The other executives, angered by his refusal, are rudely shown out of
Gondo’s house by his secretary.
We soon discover, however, that Gondo has determined to leverage a
buyout of the others, having mortgaged everything he has in order to raise the
money to gain company control, believing that he will make back his expenditure
with profits. He orders his secretary to travel to Osaka to pay the first
installment. In short, Gondo is not at all what he first seems, and is scolded
for being so impolitic by his clearly more level-headed wife. When his child,
playing cops and robbers with the chauffeur’s son appears, he encourages his
son to not simply run as the other shoots, but to trick his opponent through
surprise maneuvers. Reiko’s disdain for his attitudes is apparent. The house on
the hill may look like “heaven,” suggests the director, but trouble is clearly
brewing beneath the surface.
Almost immediately that “trouble” boils over as the chauffeur appears,
asking if they have seen his son Shinichi. He has been playing with Jun, they
report. The telephone rings, bringing the voice of a man claiming that he has
just kidnapped Jun, demanding a large payment and insisting that if they go to
the police, he will kill the boy. Horrified, Gondo realizes that he has no
choice but to use the money with which he intended to buy out the company for
his son’s release. But just as suddenly Jun reenters the house. A few minutes
later, the couple and their chauffeur realize that it is Shinichi who has
mistakenly been kidnapped, the fact of which the kidnapper, calling again,
confirms, while still demanding the money on the same terms.
Suddenly, Gondo shifts position; he refuses to pay ransom for another’s
son, and despite the kidnapper’s threat, he calls the police. Once more we see
that Gondo is not at all altruistic, but a man who attempts to manipulate
situations for his own gain. The secretary is again ordered to make plans to
travel to Osaka.
Throughout this long scene, Kurosawa films the family and their
employees, along with the police, as being trapped within the shuttered
living-room of the house while Gondo struggles with his moral scruples, both
his wife and his chauffeur pleading for him to pay for Shinichi’s release. To
do so, however, would be to lose everything they own, including their beautiful
house. Reiko, he reminds her, has been born into luxury and would be unable to
survive such a radically changed life. She, in turn, reminds him that he has
used her dowry, in part, to buy the kind of life they live, suggesting that the
couple also represent a kind of high and low pedigree, Gondo obviously having
worked his way up the social ladder.
Into this closeted, emotional maelstrom, moreover, both the kidnapper
and the policemen intrude themselves, the latter spending the night on Gondo’s
floor and couch. By morning, Gondo has determined, so he announces, not to pay
the ransom. Reiko and Aoki continue to plead, even the chief of police
entering, at times, into the debate. When Gondo’s ambitious secretary, however,
admits that he has told the other executives about his bosses’ plot, Gondo
gives in, ordering the bank to deliver the money in the proper denominations
which the kidnapper has demanded.
Film critic Joan Mellen has argued that this first part of the film—65
minutes of the 143 minutes-long movie—with its “obvious moral message,” is
salvaged by the film’s descent in its second part to the low-life world it
portrays. But as I suggest, it is not so clear in this film what is high and
what is low, whether the life the Gondos lead is one aligned with heaven or
closer to a life in hell. Moreover, it is just those moral conundrums of the
first part give such intense meaning to the rest of Kurosawa’s great work.
There is no question, however, when suddenly in the very next scene,
where Gondo sits worriedly on a bullet-train seat, the cases of money tightly
grasped, that something has radically changed. The very horizontal motion of
the speeding train racing across the countryside is a startling shift from the
darkened verticality of the Gondo house. If in his own house Gondo appeared to
be in control, once he has made the decision to give away his money, descending
into the world below and moving from the vertical to the horizontal, he is
represented as a frightened being, a true fish out of water. Cleverly, the kidnapper has not entered into
this horizontal world, but telephones to the train, explaining that Gondo will
see Shinichi standing by an upcoming bridge and that, upon seeing him alive,
Gondo should through the money out the bathroom window. The police aboard the
train have no choice but watch Gondo’s tortured acts: the train will not stop
until several miles down the track.
The boy is rescued, but Kurosawa does not focus upon his return to the
house on the hill, nor do we immediately follow Gondo’s return to his world.
Rather, Kurosawa takes us into what suddenly seems like a new genre different
from the psychological film of the first part. Suddenly, we are dropped into a
police conference that might have been the inspiration for episodes for the
American TV series, Hill Street Blues.
One by one, pairs of detectives, each assigned different tasks, report their
results, often enough revealing no real information or their informants’ lack
of facts, at other times pinning down pieces of obscure bits of gumshoe
research that might lead to something. If the Gondo house was “heaven,” we are
clearly now in purgatory, a world where nearly everything may or may not be
consequential. Here instead of things moving vertically, actions are defined by
their circularity, as in the long sequence where, realizing that the chauffeur
has taken his son in search of seaside villa in which he was held by partners
of the kidnapper, two detectives follow other clues, arriving at the same
location via an entirely different route. Within the villa are dead men and
women, killed, evidently by injections of “pure” heroin. Realizing now that the
kidnapper must have had connections with the medical profession, the detectives
circle in on a young medical intern, ultimately following him into the final
world of the picture’s title, the hell wherein the kidnapper lives.
If Gondo, living in “heaven,” spends much of his time looking down into
the world below his hill-top house, medical intern Takeuchi is almost always
seen in the film as moving up, upstairs to his apartment, upstairs—as the
police first glimpse him—in the hospital in which he works. By tricking him to
believe that his cohorts have survived their heroin-laced murders, they force
Takeuchi to repeat his own crime, sending him, they hope, once more up into the
hills where the villa sits. Following him, the police are taken in directions
they might have not expected, first to a flower shop (reminding one, somewhat,
of Madeline Elster’s several visits to a flower shop in Vertigo) where he purchases a carnation.. The next stop along the
way is a crowded bar that might appear to be a literal manifestation of the
hellish world in which the intern lives. But even here, carnation in his lapel,
Takeuchi sits high above the din of unruly dancers, pimps, sailors, and
American voyeurs—a world in which, satirically, the underground policemen seem
to be a home. Only when he discerns his “connection,” does the kidnaper descend
to the dance floor below.
His next destination is also into a hellish world, but again one they
might not have expected: a dark cul-de-sac where desperate drug addicts await
the arrival of anyone who might provide them a high. Only here, finally, are
the police recognized for who they are, and made unwelcome at the street gates,
while Takeuchi is readily admitted. But why has he stopped here in his voyage
to the hillside villa one can only ask?
As he seeks out a young woman and takes her into a nearby sleazy hotel
room, both police and audience suddenly recognize that he has stopped along his
way simply to test out the potency of his uncut drug. Before the police can
rush in to save her, the girl is dead. But in his attempt to rush away,
Takeuchi is apprehended even before he can begin the climb to the villa’s
heights.
Although they find most of Gondo’s money, it is too late, his
possessions and his house all having been repossessed. In a brilliant last
scene Kurosawa brings to the two men, the former executive and kidnapper, the
fallen and aspirant, both men of questionable ethics—although, in an ironic
twist of events, Takeuchi has transformed his enemy into a hero—together at a
prison visiting window, wherein the criminal attempts to explain his
motivations.
Kingo Gondo: Why should
you and I hate each other?
Takeuchi: I don’t know.
I’m not interested in self-analysis.
I do know my room
was so cold in winter and so hot
in summer I
couldn’t sleep. Your house looked like
heaven, high up
there. That’s how I began to hate you.
Takeuchi, clearly suffering deeply,
is the true fool, for he has imagined a heaven that is equally a hell, while
through Takeuchi’s acts, Gondo in his fall, has been redeemed. Just as in
moving in different directions, the police and the chauffeur and his son have
reached the same spot, so too have Takeuchi and Gondo discovered their
destinations are similar, even if one is free and the imprisoned, Kurosawa
merging
their facial images in the glass
between them.
Los Angeles, November 22, 2012 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review.
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