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.
T…
