Kurosawa was on a commercial filmmaking spree when he adapted Ed McBain’s “King’s Ransom” in 1963. Two years earlier, he’d turned Dashiell Hammet’s rogue detective thriller “Red Harvest” into a samurai movie with “Yojimbo,” but this time out he’d taken a novel by a Western author and kept the contemporary setting. “King’s Ransom” didn’t need any gussying up. It’s just a story well told, and Kurosawa tells it magnificently.
It’s a kidnapping tale in which a shoe manufacturing executive (the legendary Toshiro Mifune), facing internal maneuvering within his company, struggles with the moral calculus of paying the ransom to return a child who is not his own. It eventually becomes a police procedural, but not in the way you expect, and not with a conclusion you could ever predict.
I love the idea of Lee turning to his Mifune in Washington to see how this predicament would play in, I’m guessing, modern corporate America. It’d be amusing if Lee, who’s no stranger to selling kicks, keeps the shoe angle, but mostly I just want for him to pin us to our seats like he did with the twisty “Inside Man.” It’s a blast to watch auteurs make genre movies on their own aesthetic terms (see Martin Scorsese’s “Cape Fear”), so here’s hoping he’s got a corker of a script cooked up with co-writer Alan Fox (this will evidently be his first major feature credit).
The film is a joint production between A24 and AppleTV+, and if you’re a Lee fan, you can breathe easy: “High and Low” will get a theatrical release. “High and Low” begins shooting in March, so perhaps Lee will have it ready for a 2024 holiday release.