Out of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, Akira Kurosawa has fashioned a formula kidnapping melodrama that, elaborated to two-and-a-half hours, manages to engage all his burning moral concerns, undimmed, as well as all his ingenuity as an action director unsurpassed on the wide-screen. Kurosawa makes good use of McBain's knowledge of familial police operations, the pep talks, teamwork, joshing, etc. But besides that, he shows an excruciating appreciation of the ironies and ambiguities in the conflict between the Haves and the Have-Nots (the High and the Low, if you will) that isn't quite equalled in American detective fiction — McBain, McGivern, MacDonald, Macdonald, McAnyone — maybe in Dostoevski or Dickens. The plot is laid out in precise and evocative arenas (the haughty hilltop mansion occupied by the kidnap victims and, far below, the sleazy, neon-lit Ginza strip haunted by the psychopathic kidnapper); it is continually tricky and surprising (an early twist, for instance: the abducted boy turns out, after the first ransom demand, to be not the son of the rich shoe manufacturer but the son of the chauffeur); and it is faultlessly paced and timed (the mounting tensions of almost an hour of claustrophobic, stage-like drama inside the mansion are explosively released in a frantic scene aboard a rattling express train; the kidnapper, halfway through, finally makes a slithery, unpredictable entrance, sighted first as a reflection in a pool of water and followed along narrow streets, stairs, halls, to a tiny room where he gloats over his newspaper notices; and the clues and revelations, ferreted out only with difficulty and patience, are met by oddly appealing outbursts of trumpets on the soundtrack and, on one special occasion, by a splash of pink on the black-and-white film stock). Toshiro Mifune is fine, strong, restrained, as the shoe man; but he takes second place to Tatsuya Nakadai as the humble, humane policeman in charge of the case. Nakadai's reactions — his eyes bug out unnaturally, like a strangulation victim, and his chin drops to his chest, when the kidnapper, under surveillance, incredibly bumps into Mifune in front of a shoe-store window — serve as a sort of mirror or model for audience reactions. His supporting performance is the epitome of unselfish sideline-sitting. (1963) — Duncan Shepherd