High and Low (1963): trivia & fun facts

Fun facts

• Working on a production budget of ¥230 million, High and Low began filming on 2 September 1962, taking place on location in Yokohama and on set at Toho Studios.
• Tsutomu Yamazaki, viewing the film nearly 30 years after its release at the Sydney Film Festival, still considered the film "fresh and interesting", but criticised his performance as substandard.
• The story is based on Evan Hunter's novel King's Ransom (1959).
• Kurosawa also included cameos by his previous collaborators, including Susumu Fujita, the star of his first film Sanshiro Sugata (1943), and character actor Masao Shimizu.
• It was written by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Eijirō Hisaita, and Ryūzō Kikushima as a loose adaptation of the 1959 novel King's Ransom by Evan Hunter.
• Toho purchased the rights to adapt the novel in 1961 for $5,000.
• He cast Tsutomu Yamazaki to play the role of the kidnapper, possibly at the suggestion of his former assistant, Hiromichi Horikawa, who had directed Yamazaki in the film My Daughter and I (1962).
• The film was a box office success in Japan, garnering ¥460.2 million in ticket sales and becoming the highest grossing domestic film of that year.
• The re-release of High and Low in 2002 as part of a multi-title film festival accrued $561,692 for all twelve films in total.
• Upon release in the UK, a 1967 review in the magazine by Robert Vas singled out High and Low's structure as particularly inspired.
• High and Low was released in Japan on 1 March 1963 and became the highest-grossing film at the Japanese box office for that year.
• Kurosawa had intended to inspire harsher punishments by emphasising the crime's lenient sentencing, but was instead blamed for an increase in kidnapping cases.
• In August 1963, the film was entered into the Venice Film Festival as part of the Official Selection (placing it in competition for the festival's awards).
• The film was re-released in the United States, on new 35 mm prints in 1986, and again in 2002 as part of the "Kurosawa & Mifune" film festival.
• The film was produced by Toho, which bought the rights to Hunter's novel in 1961 for $5,000.

Source: Wikipedia

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