Mifune, high and low

Kurosawa's 1963 film High and Low feels like 3 separate films, at least - most of them very good, fortunately. For the first half-hour we think we;re watching a movie about corporate execs locked in a struggle for control of a Japanese shoe company - first scenes all take place in a living room as they argue about what kind of she to manufacture, who controls company stock, etc., and we think are we really going to watch this for 2 hours? The meeting breaks up w/ great bitterness and we stay w/ the exec in whose house they're meeting - and we see that he's a ruthless businessman surreptitiously seizing control from his rivals - he's played by the great Mifune, in a very unusual casting decision and a good one. Suddenly, the movie changes abruptly as Mifune gets a call that his young son has been kidnapped.He prepares to pay a large ransom - and then the story takes a very dramatic twist as we learn that his son's playmate - son of the company chauffeur, an extremely deferential character, is the one kidnapped. Should Mifune pay the ransom for the child of one of his employees? This is a great moral dilemma, and the film pushes Mifune in every direction - before he finally acquiesces and does what's right at great personal cost. I was thinking that this should definitely be remade as an English-language film and then was interested to see on the liner notes that it's based on an Ed McBain novel, so who knew? (Spoilers coming): They rescue the boy about halfway through, and then the film becomes a standard-issue police operative as a team of police officers and detectives work to capture the kidnapper and retrieve Mifune's money. To a degree, the energy has been sapped from the film at this point - but we do get a few great scenes as they track the kidnapper, particularly a long sequence following him through the city's lurid night-town and eventually into a shooting den for heroin addicts - the movie showing a side of contemporary Japanese life rarely depicted or even acknowledged at that time. Movie closes with an encounter between Mifune and the imprisoned kidnapper, sentenced to death, in which we see how deeply disturbed and bizarre the kidnapper is - visually a compelling scene, but unfortunately Kurosawa didn't build the foundation for this encounter: the kidnapper talks about his loathing for Mifune, who lives in a big house on top of a hill and visible from the city slums in the valley (note the film title), but that doesn't seem to be sufficient motive and we hadn't seen this character enough in earlier scenes to understand him or care about him - might have been less sensational and more credible if his motives were solely mercenary.