Lee's 'Highest 2 Lowest' and Kurosawa's 'High and Low'

 

“Highest 2 Lowest”

Dir: Spike Lee

Scr: Alan Fox

Pho: Matthew Libatique

Ed: Barry Alexander Brown, Allyson C. Johnson

Premiere: Aug. 16, 2025

133 min.

 

“Tengoku to jigoku (High and Low)”

Dir: Akira Kurosawa

Scr: Hideo Oguni, Ryuzo Kikushima, Eijiro Hisaita, Akira Kurosawa

Pho: Asakasu Nakai, Takao Saito

Ed: Akira Kurosawa

Premiere: March 1, 1963

143 min.

As a speaker noted at the screening of Highest 2 Lowest, this was a project that had floated around America for 35 years. Evidently Spike Lee picked up this screenplay by Alan Fox prior to COVID liked it, held onto it, and reworked it after he got Denzel Washington to star as the stressed-out music exec threatened by a kidnapper.

Looking at Lee’s vision, it’s interesting to watch him choose to be expansive and inclusive in his approach to the film, crafting many different films in one. (His repertoire of film styles within include homemovies, fanciful wipes, and documentary-like snippets.) Where Kurosawa, austere in black and white, was reductive and quiet in High and Low, Lee makes Highest 2 Lowest open out, awash in color and enchanting images, and makes music a major part of the action, even providing a musical coda that underlines the redemption of the central character, David King (Washington).

The source in both cases is Evan Hunter writing as Ed McBain’s 1959 police thriller, King’s Ransom. For both Kurosawa and Lee, it is a study in character that asks important questions about honor, compassion, and justice. (Kurosawa’s Japanese title is literally Heaven and Hell.)

King lives high in a penthouse looking spectacularly over the Brooklyn Bridge and the approach to Manhattan. He’s a hitmaker, a colossal figure in the music business who’s orchestrating a deal to take over his record company.

Suddenly, a call comes in. His teenage son has been kidnapped. The kidnapper wants $17.5 million in Swiss francs. The Kings, father and mother, go berserk. Then their son appears. It was not he but his best friend, the son of King’s chauffeur, Paul Christopher (a brilliant Jeffrey Wright), who the kidnapper snatched.

The kidnapper calls back. He doesn’t care who he has, he wants the money or the kid will die. Will King give up all his assets for the life of another man’s son?

The same close examination of character takes place in the Kurosawa film. Here, the shoe tycoon Gondo (another great performance from Toshiro Mifune) and company float around their hilltop mansion, pondering and debating what to do about the kidnapped child of his chauffeur. Shooting in 70 millimeter, Kurosawa builds carefully balanced compositions out of the attitudes of the actors present, shifting in patterns and keeping Gondo on the opposite side of the screen from his interlocutors, like some modern-day Job.

The films match each other in a general sense, following the same course of action. Each man is told that he will be reviled personally and professionally if he does not pay up. Mifune and Washington both face their demons. Both performers are quite capable of communicating the moral quandry they find themselves in.

Once Lee’s mogul decides to pay the ransom, the film opens out and becomes a veritable travelogue of New York City. There is even time for the buffoonish police force to get entangled in a concert by the late Eddie Palmieri and his Orchestra. An intricate game of cat and mouse plays out on the city streets, but the bad guys get away.

Then Lee lets the action take another turn. King remembers that the kidnapped young man had heard an incessant rap refrain during his captivity. King matches it with a mix an aspiring rapper sent to him. He and Christopher, ignored by the police, track the suspect down on their own. Now we are in action-film territory. Denzel runs the suspect down, hears his confession (ASAP Rocky plays the strapped, weed-smoking kidnapper), chases him all over town, gets on the subway – hilariously, Lee gives rabid Yankee fans a chance to look into the camera and chant “BOSTON SUCKS!” -- gives him a beat-down, and saves the day.

Kurosawa also gets away from his chamber drama after the ransom is pledged. His film turns into a straight-ahead police prodecural. Gondo makes the drop, and the police force begins a coordinated investigation into the crime, marshaling a large contingent of specialists who analyze the scant information given to them and extrapolate who the kidnapper and killer is. In contrast with Lee’s lone-hero approach, in Kurosawa success is seen as the product of a professional, joint effort.

King’s outcome, redemption and the restoration of his fortune, stands in sharp contrast to Kurosawa’s Gondo, who loses everything. Kurosawa’s villain is a triple murderer; Lee’s villain is a misguided wanna-be. Both stare up at the successful businessmen living high above them; both boil in the summer heat of the slums. Both present themselves as worthy matchers of wits; both are deluded.

“Not all money is good money,” says King. Both Kurosawa’s and Lee’s protagonists realize their true value in the heat of the moment. Though their outcomes differ, their quiet return to life underscores their new state of peace. Gondo’s kidnapper, facing death, breaks into a tortured shriek, and a metal grate comes clanging down, ending the film; Lee’s villain merely curses out the obdurate King. In the compelling dialogues the protagonist has with his opponent, he outlines the difference in their essential characters, the juxtaposition of the older, saner man and the young hothead. Then we get the redemptive ending.

Kurosawa is edgy, unbalanced. Right wins out, but the disturbing and abrupt ending asks questions it has no intention of answering about sanity and morality. It resonates. With Lee, the alert and engaged hero outfoxes and outfights his opponent, and lives to make music another day. It’s an oddly Hollywood ending, but by this time the film had been a lot of things: a moral drama, an epic chase, an action thriller, a musical. Lee makes room for what he wants.

Lee’s is, ultimately, another great New York movie. His love for the city is obvious, and he makes the most of the territory. His performers are expert, his eye unfailing. He gives us a man redeemed. Kurosawa’s is a more tragic classic.