Tengoku to jigoku (1963)'s comments

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Rohit

Extraordinary command on the script and a sheer technical brilliance. A delight!

12 years 10 months ago

rymikes

One of his [Kurosawa] strongest for sure, with Toshiro Mifune giving yet another knockout performance.

13 years 7 months ago

ClassicLady

Enthralling moral dilemma in the first hour and a decidedly great detective story in the second hour. One of the best from Kurosawa.

8 years ago

"In place of some clarification of what all this might mean, then, we are left with Gondo alone, facing a blank barrier. At the beginning of the movie, caught up in the effort to grab the company’s power for himself, he was already treading a dangerously individualistic path. Now he has finally succeeded in being fully alone in a society in which lives impinge relentlessly one on another, and has thereby—whether he wanted to or not—achieved the solitariness that was the kidnapper’s whole identity. The two have essentially become one—but we already knew that from the way the face of each, staring through the glass, was superimposed on the other. Takeuchi is a demon of isolation, defiantly cut loose from those indispensable ties of human contact that are measured throughout every frame of High and Low by a constant play of glances and postures. Hierarchies and group identities, and the impulses that can undermine them from within, are charted so clearly that we can draw the invisible lines connecting any character with any other character. From moment to moment they cannot help but show us where they are. "

9 years 6 months ago

xrobin87x

so far my favorite kurosawa. pleasant surprise!

12 years 11 months ago

MoutardedShroom

True, the first act really outshines the second one, but this is one hell of a noir nonetheless

9 years ago

andyreilly

Fantastic film - absolutely brilliant

10 years 12 months ago

Siskoid

Kurosawa's High and Low shouldn't work, and in the hands of a lesser director, definitely wouldn't have. He spends the first half of the film in a closed set, basically shooting a play about a kidnapping, quite procedural once the police arrive, but also highly emotional as a rich man's chauffeur has to humbly stand there as his boss insists he need not pay the ransom for his employee's mistakenly-taken son, a ransom that would break him financially. Then the movie opens up and becomes a proper police procedural showing the investigation and manhunt for the kidnapper, delivering a lot of the information in meetings and press conferences, which again, should not work. But we're riveted either way. Not to say it's all talking heads. The sequence aboard the train is a great, and tension mounts as the cops close in at the end - you're practically tearing your hair out as a man fails to get a taxi cab. It's so well done. On a technical level, it's flawless (duh), and there's one particular clue that just brought a smile to my face in the way it was revealed (you know the one). On a thematic level, the title turns out to be the key to everything, but you still question things to the end. If nothing else, it will make you gain respect for proper, real-world detective work, the kind we hardly ever see in movies.

4 years ago

acoltismypassport

Just watched this again, and my love for it hasn't changed a bit. Still fantastically well done.

9 years 4 months ago

ostpies

Exceptional

9 years ago

Yousef Mousa

Absolutely flawless !

9 years 1 month ago

jlfitz

Superb. It shouldn't be in the top 250, it should be in top 100!

12 years ago

DisneyStitch

My 4th film by Kurosawa and I have to admit the man knows how to make a wide variety of movies and all in fantastic fashion. Mifune excels as a brooding business tycoon caught in a moral dilemma. The suspense is palpable and many scenes are filmed with great pizazz like the sequence on the train.

Once you watch enough movies you tend to get a mental formula of how the plot will go and what will happen but this one kept me constantly on edge. Kurosawa chooses to portray the characters in such a way that makes them somewhat ambiguous with their actions and so it makes their mental state, and therefore the plot, more unpredictable.

3 years 8 months ago

Phillipe Marlowe

My goodness! Masterful done, Kurosawa is a genius.

8 years 7 months ago

Angellike

A whose who of stars, including Mifune (not acting crazy!), Takashi Shimura (The 7 samurai), Tatsuya Nakadai (The human condition) coming together and making a clever, suspenseful film. Well worth a watch.

10 years 9 months ago