"I do know my room was so cold in winter and so hot in summer I couldn't sleep. Your house looked like heaven, high up there. That's how I began to hate you."

On this episode hosts Christopher Funderburg and John Cribbs discuss the namesake of this very site, Akira Kurosawa's intense crime masterpiece High and Low! A long-standing favorite of the Pink Smoke, its founders are always excited to dig into this thriller about the harrowing moral decisions forced into play by a botched kidnapping.

The film's unique structure moves from a single-set drama about corporate back-stabbing to an expansive police procedural that winds its way through every level of Tokyo and, consequently, shifts its focus from Toshiro Mifune as an executive under pressure to Tatsuya Nakadai as the detective chasing down every lead. Brilliant from start to finish, there's a case to be made that High and Low represents the culmination of the finest era in the Japanese master's body of work.

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Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two”

Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas"