A King, a Farce, & the Queen No One Saw Coming
Kurosawa’s film “High and Low” inspired two American remakes — one rotten and one you never heard of
FILM
Part One: “Highest 2 Lowest”
The first Spike Lee film I ever saw was She’s Gotta Have It. Spike was waiting for me outside the stage door.
Twenty matinée lovers wandered out of a Columbus Circle theater in 1986, one of the film’s first screenings. There was Lee, this little guy, talking a mile a minute, and he button-holed me. Spike wanted to know what we thought of his movie!
“Well, I think you really got something here!” I said. “You must be stoked.”
He wasn’t stoked. Worried to death, in fact. Like, he’d blown it? I know that self-doubt; when you need the crowd’s love so bad, and yet it’s never enough.
I had to go. Parting words: “You know you have something here, own it.”
Some things never change, but they sure can go downhill.
Thirty-five films later, among them Do the Right Thing, Crooklyn, Malcolm X, When the Levees Broke— Spike Lee’s newest issue portends greatness: a remake of one of the greatest films every made, Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low.1
Something went terribly wrong.
The Spike Lee rip of Kurosawa’s epic is a disgrace.
There’s a lot to unpack. Lee has robbed the story of its Shakespearean gravitas, and made a mockery of its production values. I honestly wonder whether Lee’s team ran out of money and poured on Elmer’s Glue for the final cut.
But let’s back up: you have to understand the seismic power of Kurosawa’s original. He was known for period films, like Seven Samurai. But he wanted to take on the contemporary Japanese world, he wanted to best Hollywood’s greatest cinema. He decided to make a Noir, in the years following 1945.
The original High and Low could‘ve been called “Class War.” It is a devilish Rich Man/Poor Man story, a parable of post-war moral failure. It is the lie of the American Dream foisted on Yokohama city, just as GIs were pouring in, in transit to Vietnam.
This is the story: a little boy gets kidnapped. But it’s the wrong little boy, a poor man’s son, whom a rich man is called upon to save. He’ll lose his fortune if he “does the right thing”— who’s going to take a chance?
The plot is based on a 1959 Ed McBain novel (King’s Ransom).2 You won’t see what’s coming, not in the original.
Furthermore, Kurosawa storyboarded his movie within an inch of its life, every hand-painted drawing paired to a shot.
Kurosawa married a police procedural with the crisis of King Lear— and the beauty of his unequalled eye. He spent a year making it. The careers of every actor involved in the ensemble were transformed.3
Clearly, it takes some balls to say, “Hey, I have a great idea to re-make this.”
Do you know who else wanted to make this movie? Scorsese. Spielberg. Quentin Tarantino lifted a whole scene, the nightclub set, to make his Pulp Fiction. David Mamet swore he would write the American version. So did Mike Nichols, and Richard Price. Walter Salles threw his hat in the ring, who made the best film of 2024. Even Chris Rock wanted to make a contemporary version with a Black American cast.
Well, more’s the pity, because instead of getting the cream of American screenwriting talent, and a lofty budget to match, we got Spike Lee in his Bill-Cosby-Sweater-Vest-Worst, plus a screenwriter, Alan Fox, without a single screenwriter credit to his name. What could go wrong?
Then, they hired nine mediocre Assitant Directors to shoot the majority of the movie because they couldn’t afford one pro to be their full-coverage Cinematographer. Apparently. I can’t read it any other way.
There’s no class war; there’s not even a skirmish. Lee eschews the notion. The black bourgeoisie, as pictured in this soap bubble, has nothing to regret.
No one in this picture has a moral quandary, unless you count sucking ass for good press. The stakes couldn’t be lower. The boy’s ransom is paid because “What will Twitter say?” The most passionate Lee gets is having “King David” (Denzel Washington) berate his son for spending too much time on his cell phone.4
The subway scene on Puerto Rican Independence Day, which truly is a fête in NYC, is shot well enough. It’s one section, an hour+ in, I’d warrant was filmed or at least supervised by DP Matthew Libatique. Alas, it’s plopped into the larger container of whatever.
The original music is worth noting. More than one film-goer at my screening walked out, groaning. I’m not talking about the big songs they licensed, I mean the “background” music, the original soundtrack. It was cringeworthy, beyond-Hallmark, beyond-Guiding Light . . . I took my hearing aids out to muffle it. My seat-mates looked on in envy.
The New Yorker critic, Richard Brody, said that Lee seems to be turning into a conservative-politics filmmaker, Black Archie Bunker who wants the rabble to “get off his lawn.”
Yeah, well, Eastwood, Rohmer, and Stillman can still write 3-acts that make narrative sense. Lee didn’t even end his picture dramatically— instead, he tacked on fifteen minutes of something that resembles a Glee television blooper. Jazz Hands, everyone!
Part 2: “Full Circle”
Do you know who else, which master filmmaker, actually DID direct a worthy remake of High and Low?
Steven Soderbergh.
In 2024, he and writer Ed Solomon made a television mini-series called Full Circle5 starring Clare Danes, Timothy Olyphant, Jim Gaffigan, and the incandescent CCH Pounder. It is their homage to Kurosawa’s High and Low, and if he was alive, he would respect it.
Soderbergh turned Kurosawa’s premise into a 3-generation mystery:
First, we are introduced to a Guyanese immigrant family (imagine an Indo-Caribbean Sopranos), led by the ancestor-worshiping Mrs. Savitri Mahabir. She has a karmic debt to settle.
What does a mob matriarch in Queens have to do with a Greenwich Village household of white atheist dilettantes?
Enter family No. 2 — Derek and Samantha Brown are Manhattan know-it-alls who’ve made a fortune. One look at their apartment, we know they didn’t earn it on wages. The couple are helicopter parents to their shy son, Jared, who would love to escape.
Finally, dysfunctional family No. 3: the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. We are introduced to the lowest rung of detectives in the police world, the U.S. Postal Fraud department, riddled with corruption.
In this case, Soderbergh knew he couldn’t recreate the altruism of Kurosawa’s quaint Japanese police department. A 21st century set of detectives would need to be corrupt.
Our single heroine is a postal inspector named “Harmony,” who goes on a psychiatrically-questionable rampage while employing her instincts to unravel the kidnapped-boy mystery— like a modern-day Samson bringing down the walls of the Philistines.
Harmony knows there is human trafficking coming out of Guyana, teenagers brought to the US with promises of glory and put to dirty work. Shades of heroin-ridden Yokohama City!
She knows that the wealthy Browns, who claim they can’t find Guyana on a map, have a colonial family history that says otherwise.
Part of the fun with Soderbergh is you won’t rationally grasp what is happening the first few minutes. But emotionally, you’re already caught in his web, the churn of human deceit. In this, he reaches for Kurosawa’s heaven.
“You understand,” one Guyanese elder says, “Da t’ings happening to your family, dey are happening . . . for a reason.”
I knew little of Guyana when I began the TV series, something likely to be true of most Americans. Nor did I know anything of Kurosawa’s Yokohama ghettos before I saw High and Low.
No matter. We understand the “gangster mind” and we know the “colonial cartel.” Revenge is best served with ritual, no matter where in the world it is set.
Spoiler: The Queer and the Queen, of High and Low
Okay, ready for some special sauce?
There are two aspects to Kurosawa’s drama which have escaped the critical review.
One, is the motif of the shoe factory, where the boss Gondo, played by Yoshiro Mifune, reigns supreme. He will never betray his OG background, “quality shoe leather.”
At first, the modern viewer giggles. Shoes? Not exactly petrochemicals and microchips.
My friend Scott Kikkawa told me the more pertinent metaphor, of postwar industrialist ambitions destroying basic, solid values.
“Mifune’s character laments the decline of quality footwear,” Scott explained. “When Kurosawa released the film in ‘63, not coincidentally, consumers no longer wanted to pay for Goodyear-welted shell cordovan long wings. —A dark time in sartorial history. It was the beginning of the end.”
Everyone after the war wanted—or were hyped to want— the cheap, the fast, the disposable.
The shoe whose integrity could last forever, is echoed in High and Low’s character who plays the industrialist’s wife, Reiki.
Gondo (her big shot husband) ridicules her, saying she understands nothing, and tries to banish her from the room.
She won’t leave: “I know what is going on.”
Kurosawa was no feminist. But the queen of his storyboard, the only named- female in the script, is the undeniable heroine. The good shoe, and the good woman. Those ridiculed as “soft” and out of touch, (women and children) are in fact the steel last.
The second hidden part of the film, is the gay demimonde of the final act. We see our schizo perp visiting the viper pit of Yokohama, a nightclub where American GI’s party with the Japanese dispossessed. Everyone is fucked up on dope and jazz!
Around the 2-hour mark, we hear song that introduces us to the dance floor, a tiki cover of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.”
I will eat my hat, if David Lynch didn’t rip this inspiration directly into Blue Velvet.
At the nightclub, our undercover cops form a dragnet to surround the young man. It is the only time in the film we see black actors, and white ones, the American sailors in their milieu. There are interracial couples dancing, and B-girls hustling, including one hooker who will make the drop with our boy.
Attention Queer Shippers:
Two very hot men, undercover dicks, are dressed in aloha shirts. Ah yes, American perversion, the slippery slope. Once inside the club, they knot their shirts tight at the waist. It’s a dead giveaway.
They are doing the twist to “In Dreams,” shading our antihero.
Habitués of closet gay cinema know the signs: comely men, dressed as fetching as women (if not more), are moving through the twilight like they own the place. They dance tight and close, zero apprehension. They won’t be spotted because anything goes here.
A final real-life clue arrives from actor Tsutomu Yamazaki’s interview on Criterion’s special feature reel for the High and Low.
Yamazaki was discovered by Kurosawa, to play the picture’s beautiful doomed young man. His reflections are poignant.
Yamazaki explains that his good-looking acting school friends were recruited to fill the nightclub scene. The one stud you can’t take your eyes off, pictured above in the Hawaiian shirt, was special to him.
“He was a really good dancer,” Tsutomu says, trailing off.
He pauses. “He died shortly after we made the movie, and I. . . always think of him, so fondly.”
High and Low debuted in theaters, the week John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The shock was the biggest international news event since Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This fact, more than any other, is why it took so long for critics around the world, to view Kurosawa’s dark angel. He had said something no one wanted to hear, even though the youthful alienation it spoke to, was breaking wide open. Vietnam. Rock and roll. Black and white. Generations who didn’t speak to each other, didn’t speak the same language.
The film couldn’t be more timely for today. Thankfully, the poor imitations are not capable of leaving a mark. Heaven and hell, off and on screen, tick-tock.
In Case You Missed It
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In addition to the luxurious BluRay edition, you can find High and Low on HBO-Max, and gratis, fat the Internet Archive. Meanwhile, the Criterion issue, online, has all the special features, which are superb.
Dick Hill does an admirable job with the audio narration. Ed McBain, the author, also wrote The Blackboard Jungle, and the screenplay for The Birds.
I highly recommend the Criterion Collection package, which includes a heartrending interview with actor TsutomuYamazaki, who played the young doomed blackmailer.
We know where to find top notch Denzel Washington. Jeffrey Wright shoulda won the Oscar for his American Fiction turn. But the rest of Lee’s cast should be sent the Playhouse for remedial theater.
The wife’s role in particular, shocked me. In Kurosawa’s original, Kyôko Kagawa played the Rich Man’s wife, her eyes alone holding the screen like black diamonds. She was the Cassandra and the Lily— unimpeachable. In Lee’s version, Ilfenesh Hadera plays a corporate wife, or rather, an ennui container. She’s just bored.
Still not on DVD/Blu-Ray. Which is unconscionable. Full Circle was not promoted at all.
In my opinion, Kurosawa it’s not indicting America by using Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom to tell a story of emasculation in post World War II Japan.
That his sympathies lie more firmly with the ex medical student junkie then with the bourgeois factory owner is born out, for me, in the final scene of the film. The kidnapper explodes with rage and fury in his cage, utterly defeated and humiliated. The bourgeois factory owner, seen from behind as he faces our anti-hero, is rendered mute by what he sees before him. He becomes a non-entity in the face of this new animal -
this hybrid of Western and Japanese culture, so totally foreign to King’s world. And now, to Spike Lee’s as well.
It hurts to see spike Lee turn into Bill Cosby. Not in every way, but in the “you damn kids with your pants hanging off your ass” kind of way. And Denzel is supposed to be playing the biggest hip-hop record producer ever? He’s sooo square! So who is King supposed to be exactly? There aren’t that many contenders … plus the product placement of his art collection as a signal to the audience that black bourgeoisie indifference is a “thing.” Jeez.
There’s almost no relationship to the original Kurosawa film.