I watched a couple of things that had been sitting around for ages. High and Low is a 1963 Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa. The literal translation of the Japanese title is Heaven and Hell and it's a theme in the movie. Toshiro Mifuni is a well off business man who's right on the verge of taking over the shoe company when his kid is kidnapped by a guy from the slums lower down the hill. The 30 million yen the kidnapper wants will screw up the deal and he'll be ruined. Turns out the kidnapper wasn't very good at his job and he got the chauffeur's son instead. The cops come rolling in and the 
chase is on. The money is collected, packed and delivered. The kid gets returned and the police hunt for the bad guy. The police procedural part of the movie is pretty good and Mifuni is great as the proud but damaged businessman. He's tossed out of the company and his debts are piling up. The police follow one clue after another and find some dead junkies. That leads them to the kidnapper and it's just a matter of time before he's nicked. It's rather long, 143 minutes, but it moves along pretty well most of the time. It's a good crime drama with some nice shots of Fujisawa Japan.
The Bad Sleep Well is a melodrama with Toshiro Mifuni as the son of a dead ruined man bound for revenge. He changes his name and sets up a new identity. He works his way into the life of the evil business guy and marries his crippled daughter. His revenge plan doesn't quite go his way, he falls in love with his wife, and then he's murdered in the last part of the movie. The evil guys daughter and son find out he had Toshiro killed and they tell him they are no longer his children. It's one of those sad downer kind of films people seem to like. I'm not such a big fan of them. I would rather see that evil business guy's head on a pole outside his office but that's me. It's a pretty good movie just not one I need to see too often. There are more entertaining Kurosawa films to watch.
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