Film 3 for the Letterboxd Season Challenge. The other films I plan to watch for the challenge are here.

Week 3, Sept 20-26: Master of the East
Challenge: Watch an unseen film directed by Akira Kurosawa
Film I Chose: High and Low (1963)

tf-high_and_low_poster

I’ve been keeping up watching the films for the Letterboxd challenge; less so writing them up, and even less so posting my thoughts over here! So expect an onslaught of posts ever the next few days as I catch up. Japanese film is troublesome for me, and I often have trouble with even the most well-known and accessible films, like those from Kurosawa. That said, more exposure is definitely helping, and I’ve really been looking forward to High and Low, which was my first non-samurai Kurosawa film.

Maybe this is the direction I need to go, because I loved this. I knew the basics of the premise, that Toshiro Mifune played a businessman who has his son kidnapped and held for ransom, but then discovers that the kidnapper made a mistake and kidnapped his chauffeur’s son instead – will he still jeopardize his long-planned company takeover and risk losing everything in order to pay the ransom on the boy?