Composer

Masaru Sato

2: briefs
13:00: average
26 min: in total

On film.briefs2

High and Low

Akira Kurosawa · 1963

Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low adapts Evan Hunter’s King’s Ransom into a stark, vertically structured drama about a businessman’s moral crisis after a kidnapping goes wrong. Shot in black and white by Asakazu Nakai and Takao Saito, it divides cleanly between Gondō’s elevated Yokohama home and the city’s slums, using space, lens, and editing to interrogate inequality, policing, and accountability. With Toshirō Mifune and Tsutomu Yamazaki in career-defining roles, it remains a benchmark of socially engaged genre filmmaking.

13:00

Sanjuro

Akira Kurosawa · 1962

Akira Kurosawa’s 1962 jidaigeki Sanjuro reunites Toshirō Mifune’s ronin in a tightly coiled feudal intrigue, where tactical wit outweighs swordplay and social comedy emerges from the chasm between idealism and perception. Less violent and more structurally austere than its predecessor Yojimbo, it traces a masterless samurai’s reluctant intervention among nine inept young retainers, culminating not in triumph but in a disillusioned walk away. Shot by Takao Saitō, edited by Kurosawa, and scored by Masaru Sato, it is a film of precision, restraint, and dry, cumulative irony.