Well, speaking of great filmmakers, we've got one for you this week.

His name is Akira Kurosawa, and the movie is high and low.

One of the strangest things about high and low is that the first hour or so, or I guess to be more precise, about the first 55 minutes,

all takes place after a series of establishing shots of Yokohama in a single house and really

just in one or two rooms. It's basically a chamber play. As we come out of that, there's an incredibly

dramatic sequence on a train, which is visually the most kind of ecstatic and frantic I think we get in

the whole movie, but which only lasts about four minutes. And so against the first,

you know, 55 minutes or so, it's really a stark contrast. And then the second half is basically a

police procedural. And though the first half is kind of emotionally engrossing because it concerns

this kidnapping and ransom plot, the second half is engrossing in a different way. I would say

it's kind of intellectually engrossing because it's a very granular procedural in which you're

following different police investigators who are investigating this kidnapping. And if high and low was

only this, if you stripped away most of the first hour and if you stripped away the social commentary

and many of the other themes in the film, this would still be a really, really rock solid police

procedural because the actual details of the crime and the way it's investigated are themselves

so engrossing and so wonderfully executed. I just want to make one other comment about the structure and

pacing of the film, which I think is worth noting as well before we get into the plot. As I've alluded to

already, the plot concerns this kidnapping and ransom plot, but this only occupies, I mean, the actual

duration of the kidnapping only occupies about, about an hour of the film. So the child who is taken is actually

returned around about the one hour mark or shortly after. The identity of the kidnapper is also

revealed, so there's no mystery there either. Even the way that the return of the child is filmed

is somewhat emotionless. It's filmed at this very kind of odd long shot as

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