Cinema Nova is showing restored Akira Kurosawa films and there are many that I haven’t seen. This one just happened to fit into my schedule and with a 9:15 pm screening in one of the small basement cinemas, I was kept company by a ragtag assortment of film nerds.

Starring Toshirô Mifune as Kingo Gondo, a successful and principled director of a shoe company, his values are challenged when he thinks his son has been kidnapped. He is in a battle with his fellow directors as to the direction of the company – they want to cut production cost and increase profits and he is more old school, believing that quality will always sell better. He has just committed all of his money and mortgaged everything they have – a delightful surprise for his wife Reiko (Kyôko Kagawa) – to take control of the company and so the prospect of having to pay a ransom is a complicated one.

It is complicated even more when it turns out that the kidnapped child is not their own but the son of his chauffeur Aoki (Yutaka Sada) and so we start seeing the highs and lows – of class and status, of quality and production, and of values. I think the original title of this is Heaven and Hell and I can see how both resonate.

The second half of the film is surprisingly gripping, with the police team under the direction of Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) gradually profiling the kidnapper and setting about trying to find and apprehend him. There are shades of the criminal profiling that we saw emerge in the 90s, as they delve into the psyche of someone who may have committed an act like this and suspect that it is personally targeted.

There is some extraordinary art direction and camera work – the kidnapper (Tsutomu Yamazaki) walking through Dope Alley was particularly evocative, almost choreographed with just ambient sound to communicate an otherworldly hopelessness.

It’s a masterful work and I know there have been discussions of remakes by prominent directors. I can almost imagine it but I’m not sure if they could capture the black-and-white beauty and cultural formality and drama.