The peerless screenplay was written by Kurosawa, Eijirô Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Hideo Oguni, adapted from the 1959 pulp novel King’s Ransom. The book was written by Ed McBain, pseudonym for Evan Hunter, which was the adopted name of Salvatore Albert Lombino. Using a variety of pen names, McBain penned pulp crime books that were three or four levels below Mickey Spillane. As Hunter, he wrote The Blackboard Jungle and the screen adaptation for Hitchcock’s The Birds — probably the best film the great profile ever made. In short, under whatever guise, Hunter was no budding John Steinbeck.
This makes the adaptation by Hisaita all the more impressive, for, while I never read the novel the film is derived from, as a youth I read a few McBain books and, even then, saw they were cardboard, both character- and plot-wise. Most criticisms of the film claim that, aside from the basic premise, the two works deviate greatly. One can thus likely (according to Occam’s Razor) attribute the positives in this 143 minute (but swift paced) long film to the work of Hisaita and company, not McBain.
The story is as follows: the film opens as sort of an inverse of Ikiru. The last half of that film was set entirely at a wake, with a few interruptions via flashback. This film’s first 40% (about 55 minutes) takes place in a luxurious Westernized house on a hillside in the city of Yokohama, replete with air conditioning and tinted windows which keep the sounds, scenes, and scents of the industrial city at bay. The house is owned by Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), a shoe executive with National Shoes, whose business motto is, "A man must kill or be killed." He is ripping into some colleagues who want to make inferior products that sell better, and scheming to take away the company from the man who founded it.
The three other executives own 7% of the stock each, while the ‘Old Man’ owns 25%. Unbeknownst to them, or Gondo’s assistant, Kawanishi (Tatsuya Mihashi), Gondo actually owns 28% of the stock, and has raised 50 million yen to purchase another 19%, giving him 47% of the company — more than the three men and the old Man combined. He can now take over the company he started at as a boy. After dismissing his three colleagues, who are embittered, and just as he is about to send his assistant off to Osaka to complete the deal, he gets a phone call claiming his son, Jun (Toshio Egi), has been kidnapped. The kidnapper demands 30 million yen for his release. Gondo is stunned, and his wife, Reiko (Kyôko Kagawa), crushed. Just as he is about to reach the apex of his career it is to be taken away. But, the kidnapper has erred. He has taken not Jun, but Jun’s friend Shinichi (Masahiko Shimazu), son of Gondo’s chauffer, a widower named Aoki (Yutaka Sada), who was wearing his friend’s cowboy costume.
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