Kurosawa Crime Collection (4-Disc DVD set)

Akira Kurosawa, one of the cinema's greatest auteurs, has wowed audiences and inspired filmmakers as diverse as George Lucas and Sergio Leone.

This 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).

Films:

Drunken Angel was the film that gave Toshiro Mifune his first major screen role. The anger and energy of his performance made him a star and he went on to work with Kurosawa in 16 films. 

Dr Sanada (Takashi Shimura), the drunken angel of the title, runs a clinic in the slums of Tokyo. When small-time hood Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune) comes to his surgery after a gunfight, Sanada diagnoses him with tuberculosis and convinces him to begin treatment. The disillusioned doctor feels that, by saving this young yakuza, he can retrieve a sense of his own lost youth and idealism. Thus they embark on a troubled friendship which is tested by the prejudices of the two and the release from prison of Matsunaga's mobster boss.

Despite being Kurosawa's eighth feature, Drunken Angel was the director's first critical success and the first film in which he felt that he finally discovered himself.

Stray Dog is a masterful mix of film noir and police thriller, set on the sweltering mean streets of occupied Tokyo. 

When rookie detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune) has his pistol stolen from his pocket while on a bus, his frantic attempts to track down the thief lead him to an illegal weapons market in the Tokyo underworld. But the gun has already passed from the pickpocket to a young gangster, and Murakami's gun is identified as the weapon in the shooting of a woman. Murakami, overwhelmed with remorse, turns for help to his older and more experienced senior, Sato (a superb performance by Takashi Shimura). The race is on to find the shooter before he can strike again.

The Bad Sleep Well, the first film made by Kurosawa's own, newly founded production company, was also the first over which he had complete control. He wanted to make 'a movie of some social significance' and decided to target the culture of corruption he saw pervading post-war Japanese society. This impressive tale of greed, corporate corruption and revenge is a powerful indictment of the dark side of business and politics with distinct overtones of Hamlet.

Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) is a grieving son seeking revenge for the 'suicide' of his father. By assuming a new identity he rises through the ranks of the Public Corporation and cynically marries the President's daughter to better infiltrate the company and expose the corrupt practice that was responsible for his father's death. However, as Koichi falls in love with his wife, disaster looms.

Based on crime writer Ed McBain's detective novel King's Ransom, High and Low is a gripping police thriller starring Kurosawa's regular collaborator Mifune.

Wealthy industrialist Kingo Gondo (Mifune) faces an agonising choice when a ruthless kidnapper, aiming to snatch his young son, takes the chauffeur's boy by mistake – but still demands the ransom. Gondo, engaged in a precarious scheme to seize control of the shoe company he works for, faces ruin if he pays up.

Although the film is based on the McBain novel, Kurosawa essentially takes the plot outline – a kidnapping that goes wrong and the moral dilemma it poses – and, with his scriptwriters, turns it into something more ambiguous and complex; an anatomy of the inequalities in modern Japanese society.