“High and Low” (天国と地獄), Original Japanese Re-Release Movie Poster 1977, B1 Size (c. 71 × 103 cm) (G)

This is an original Japanese B1 theatrical poster printed in 1977 for the re-release of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (天国と地獄), a Japan crime masterpiece directed by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshirō Mifune (as Kingo Gondo), with Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyōko Kagawa, and Takashi Shimura.

This is a previously-folded large-format B1, produced for major-theatre display and far scarcer than the standard B2 size. A superb collector’s format for one of Kurosawa’s greatest modern works.

Film background
First released in 1963, High and Low is widely regarded as one of the greatest thrillers ever made. Mifune plays a wealthy executive forced into a brutal moral decision when a kidnapping and ransom demand targets a child connected to his household. Kurosawa adapted the story from Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom, transforming it into both a razor-tight procedural and a searing social critique—contrasting the “high” of Gondo’s hilltop home with the “low” of Yokohama’s underworld. While Kurosawa is famed for his samurai epics, this film proves he was far from a one-trick pony: his modern suspense films are every bit as masterful, timeless, and psychologically precise.

Poster design
This 1977 B1 uses the most iconic pressure-cooker imagery from the film. The entire upper panel is a tense interior tableau: Mifune trapped on the telephone in the foreground, faces tightening around him in anxious profile, while the room’s depth pulls the eye toward the windowed city view—“high” above the world as the crisis closes in. Across the very top, bold Japanese copy underscores the film’s real-world impact and stakes, turning the sheet into an urgent headline as much as an advertisement.

The bottom band is pure theatrical impact: 「黒沢明監督作品」 (“A film by Akira Kurosawa”) in red, above the massive brush-stroke title 「天国と地獄」 in vivid yellow—lettered like a proclamation. In B1 scale, the calligraphy becomes almost architectural on the wall: immediate, museum-like, and unmistakably Japanese in its graphic power.

Condition
Excellent. Previously folded (as issued). Please review the imagery—these photos show the exact poster you will be purchasing.

It is over 48 years old!

It is not a reproduction or a reprint.

Certificate of Authenticity included.