ACAB, and that includes the handsome boys in excellent Kurosawa films. 

It’s made clear pretty early on in High and Low that Gondo, the wealthy shoe executive who falls victim to kidnapping-for-ransom plot, is not someone we can easily root for. His coworkers are introduced as greedy, money-hungry corporate leeches compared to Gondo’s, who displays pride in providing quality products over cheaping out for higher profits. He’s a man of integrity, refusing to participate in a takeover that would result in bigger paydays for the executives at the top - but it turns out his refusal isn’t integrity at all, he’s just got his own plans to gain more power. And when it turns out it wasn’t his son that was kidnapped, but the son of his chauffeur instead? The ransom payment he was ready to throw down is all of a sudden off the table, and Gondo reels through a personal crisis that is clearly more of a financial burden than a moral dilemma to him. 

Not exactly “good guy” behavior, right? Thankfully he does the right thing and cooperates in getting his chauffeur’s son back unharmed and also manages to suffer the financial consequences of paying the large ransom (and his attempted buyout of his company’s shares) with a little bit of grace and humility. The whole ordeal would be stressful and terrifying for any person, so it is a little wild to villainize someone who might say some questionable things in the heat of those moments. But what keeps Gondo from rising above the mess and becoming the hero of this story isn’t in his own explicit actions, but in the entitlement shown to a man of his economic status. 

Which brings me back to the subject of police. It could be argued that the detectives at the heart of this film are just men doing their jobs, and they really are - one point someone mentions to Gondo that it’s not their place to judge him for potentially not paying the ransom (watching the silent reactions of each character during Gondo’s outbursts while he tries to convince himself, and everyone else, that his choice to not pay doesn’t make him a bad person was an exceptional viewing experience for me) and that they’re just there to solve the mystery at hand. But as the film plays out, it becomes more and more apparent that everything is going to work out in Gondo’s favor: the police have a pretty good relationship with the media, so they’ll create a sympathetic narrative when he’s ousted from his company; there will be demands for a sentence much harsher than the law calls for before the detectives have even narrowed down a suspect or a motive, and one detective will even voice his personal support for Gondo so passionately at one point that his coworkers need to tell him to calm down. 

The story is extremely well told, and it’s about as straightforward as it can get when it comes to police procedurals - crime happens, police investigate, bad guy gets caught. But there’s something slightly unsatisfying about the result of this film’s investigation and I think it has everything to do with what I’ve been rambling on about in this review. We do get a final word from our kidnapper, whose motive turned out to be a simple hatred for Gondo’s upper-class way of living. His crimes eventually escalated from a single kidnapping into the realm of illicit drugs and potential murder so he definitely needed to be locked up, but there is an unsettling sliver of truth in his final words to Gondo; his envy may have been extreme, but the circumstances that created it are all too real and normalized, as are the forcing working to keeping the Highs high and the Lows low.