High and Low is a 1963 Japanese police procedural crime film directed and edited by Akira Kurosawa. It was written by Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Eijiro Hisaita, and Ryūzō Kikushima as a loose adaptation of the 1959 novel King's Ransom by Evan Hunter. Starring Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyōko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi, Yutaka Sada, and Tsutomu Yamazaki, it tells the story of Japanese businessman Kingo Gondo (Mifune) struggling for control of the major shoe company at which he is a board member. He plans a leveraged buyout of the company with his life savings, when kidnappers led by Ginjirō Takeuchi (Yamazaki) mistakenly kidnap his chauffeur's son to ransom him for 30 million yen.