What We’re Watching – September 2024

This month, our What We’re Watching column brings you a Kurosawa classic and two lesser-known films worthy of your attention. Keep reading below:

High and Low (1963)

Despite Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low being a taut thriller, there’s a great amount of pathos stirred by the dilemma Kingo Gondo (Tishiro Mifune) finds himself in. Gondo is an executive of a shoe company at a turning point. Gondo believes the company should lean into modern styles, but maintain their reputation by continuing to produce high-quality shoes. His cohort believes the company should lower the quality of their shoes and produce in mass quantities to chase profit. To prevent this from happening, Gondo arranges a leveraged buyout of the company and mortgages his estate.

At home, Gondo’s plan is disrupted by a call he receives. A man claims to have kidnapped his son and demands a hefty ransom. Gondo is distraught, but temporarily relieved when he realizes his son is safe. However, he comes to realize that his son’s friend, the son of his chauffeur, was kidnapped erroneously. The kidnapper realizes his mistake but does not relent with his demands and Gondo’s temporary relief shrivels away. Gondo has to make a decision – pay the ransom and lose his company and livelihood, or not pay the ransom and be forced to live with the guilt if something were to happen to his chauffeur’s son.

High and Low is memorable for its exploration of the polarity between the empathyless world of business and the morality of the individual. It’s a fascinating thriller that fits nicely within Kurosawa’s humanist and morality-centric filmography. – Alex Sitaras

Gambit (1966)

Director Ronald Neame’s Gambit is an absolute blast. Its poster and tagline highlight its unconventional approach, boasting, “Go ahead, tell the end (it’s too hilarious to keep secret). But please, don’t tell the beginning!” Somewhat a play on recent releases of the time, such as Psycho, that were especially spoiler-averse, Gambit packs plenty of surprises throughout its runtime as it follows a man going by the name Harry Dean (Michael Caine) and his associate Emile (John Abbott) tracking down Nicole Chang (Shirley MacLaine), a showgirl in Hong Kong. The two men are planning a heist with the target being the “richest man in the world”, Shahbandar (Herbert Lom). Nicole has been carefully chosen for her striking resemblance to both Shahbandar’s late wife and to a statue that Harry and Emile plan to steal. She is a tactical distraction, aiming to disarm a typically very guarded and reclusive man. It is a generally familiar setup, but how Gambit goes about it is both influential to later heist films (especially ones with a “now that you think you know what happened, here is what was really going on” finale) and tremendous on its own terms. 

Expectations of how the heist would go and the reality of it are a great opening framing of the story, highlighted by MacLaine, who is hysterical as the very quiet Nicole in the expectations and the polar opposite, in true MacLaine fashion, in reality with an increasingly agitated Harry fighting her tooth-and-nail to follow the plan. The film’s finale leans into the playful nature of its setup to good effect, proving that even the audience was part of the sleight-of-hand trick that Harry and Emile were looking to pull off. Lom’s rich target adds to the fun, adding to the expectations-vs-reality side of the film and actually being a fun mental chess partner for Harry to confront. Shahbandar and Harry actually both have a lot in common, namely in their inability to see every angle despite maintaining full confidence that they see more than every angle. Gorgeous production design adds to the appeal with Gambit slipping into its Hong Kong and Middle Eastern settings with style. Fun and surprisingly clever, Gambit is a delight. – Kevin Jones

Accident (2009)

The massive success of Soi Cheang‘s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In as well as the planned sequels likely mean that the filmmaker will dwell in the realm of big-budget spectaculars for the time being. But as 2021’s Limbo proved to the many converts it won him, his sensibilities are very much rooted in the world of (often extremely grimy) genre filmmaking and the Johnnie To protégé delivered his first masterpiece with 2009’s Accident, a film that Frankensteins To’s winding plots, Le Samouraï, The Conversation, and Final Destination into a fraught whole.

Following an assassin who gets rid of his targets by making their deaths look like freak accidents, the film dissolves into paranoia when he gets caught in the crosshairs of his former employers after a hit goes horribly wrong — or does he? It’s worth noting that Accident isn’t quite as pure a genre flex as 2006’s Dog Bite Dog or 2012’s Motorway were but instead of visceral action, Cheang takes this conceit to ponder the nature of chance, the cruelty of coincidence, and the architecture of fate. – Fred Barrett