Akira Kurosawa, one of the cinema’s greatest auteurs, has wowed audiences worldwide and inspired filmmakers as diverse as George Lucas and Sergio Leone. This highly collectable 4-disc box set highlights his mastery of the crime genre bringing together four of his finest thrillers.
Included here is the yakuza gangster drama Drunken Angel (1948); the atmospheric police thriller Stray Dog (1949); the tale of corporate greed and corruption, The Bad Sleep Well (1947); and the gripping Ed Mcbain adaptation High and Low (1963).
Drunken Angel: Toshiro Mifune, in his first major screen role, plays a small-time Yakuza who embarks on an uneasy friendship with an alcoholic slum doctor, played by Toho regular Takashi Shimura. Drunken Angel is part gangster, part melodrama and part social critique, and establishes the on-screen chemistry and dynamics of these two leading men that Kurosawa was to explore in further films.
Stray Dog: A masterful mix of film noir and police thriller set on the sweltering mean streets of occupied Tokyo. Kurosawa favourites, Mifune and Shimura, are paired for the second time as a rookie detective and his senior in a desperate hunt for a shooter with the former’s stolen police pistol.
The Bad Sleep Well: The first feature brought out under the aegis of Kurosawa’s own production company. The Bad Sleep Well, is an impressive tale of corporate greed and corruption starring Mifune as a grieving son seeking revenge for his father’s ‘suicide’. It is a powerful indictment of the dark side of business and politics with distinct overtones of Hamlet.
High and Low: Based on an Ed McBain novel, High and Low is a gripping police thriller in which a wealthy industrialist, Mifune, faces an agonising choice when a ruthless kidnapper, aiming to snatch his young son, takes the chauffeur’s boy by accident.
