Just finished Akira Kurosawa's Crime Movie box set of four movies. It's all fascinating stuff and, from a technical point of view, everything is excellent. But from an entertainment point of view? There's definitely a case that some are better than others.
All are black and white and all take place in the setting of post second world war defeated Japan where western influence intermingles with traditional culture and where the ruins of desolation intermingles with the new prosperity of rebirth and opportunity. As such, each movie is filled with visual feasts, both post-apocalyptic and optimistic, a sort of Japanese version of Charles Dickens' tales of the Victorian era, such as A Tale of Two Cities or A Christmas Carol.
Drunken Angel (1948) is about an aging doctor who becomes very concerned about a local hoodlum who refuses to follow his instructions on how to help cure himself of tuberculosis. It damages the hoodlum's sense of cool, maaaan. As a result, both are quite unlikeable characters and the film is quite hard to watch with any sense of care. Enjoyable for the visual elements, acting, atmosphere but quite forgettable in terms of viewer sympathy. 3/5
Stray Dog (1949) sees the same actors return for a similarly themed film whereby an aging and wiser detective helps a younger and more foolhardy junior detective hunt down a bad guy. The twist here is that the young detective is obsessed with catching the bad guy because the bad guy is using his gun to commit his crimes, the film starting with our hero being pick-pocketed of his gun, to his great and very Japanses sense of shame and dishonour.
I quite enjoyed this one as it has quite a lot going on and is quite pacy with a good sense of the chase. Where it falls down is where the pacing is stalled for no real reason other than directorial gluttony, such as a whole 8 minute scene of our young detective just prowling the streets with no dialoge and no real reason to follow him in such fine detail. Also, the last half an hour is quite formulaic and a bit frustrating as it conforms to predictable "oh don't do that dumb thing" cliches to extend the run time. 3.5/5
The Bad Sleep Well (1960) is apparently Kurosawa's modern Japanese take on Shakespeare's Hamlet. A large corporation is knee deep in corruption, to the point where they've started bumping off the lower players to protect the leads which trail back to their door. Our hero is out for personal revenge however, being a relative of one of the schmucks who got bumped off, and is carefully planning an equally evil strategy to bring the house of cards crashing down.
A really fascinating and excellent film, full of plot twists, noir, tension and conniving assholes. This time he has given us a likeable hero though, which makes this movie shine out above the previous two. It then screws the pooch at the end though by denying us a satisfying ending. The audience at the time was of the same mindset and the film bombed as a result, which is a shame as the previous two hours was pure genius. 4/5
High and Low (1963) is probably the most "must watch" of the four and is a good culmination of everything Kurosawa had learnt by this point. Here we see the corporate corruption, the moral flexibility of the wealthy, the excellently paced police procedural, the fascinating characters and the whole array of Japanese society.
Just as a wealthy businessman is about to buy up the majority shares in his company, someone kidnaps his son and demands all that money as ransom. The early twist? It turns out they didn't kidnap his son but instead took the chauffeur's son by mistake. Cue some early brilliant dialogue as his dialogue instantly shifts from "OMG, don't call the cops, he said don't call the cops or he'd kill my son!" to "Not my son? Call the cops, call the cops immediately!", almost within the same breath. This kind of quality is maintained for the duration. 5/5