Despite being advised not to, Gondo calls the police, the main lawmen being Inspector Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) and Detective Bos’n (Kenjiro Ishiyama), and they tape his calls from the kidnapper, in order to trace them. But they cannot. We sometimes see the calls in real time, and at other times are elided to a replay of a call, at a later moment. Gondo, at first, refuses to pay the ransom, despite pleas from his chauffer and his wife. Kawanishi wants to still go to Osaka, but Gondo stops him. By the next morning, Kawanishi sells Gondo out to his three rivals, telling them of his plans and the kidnapping. He claims that Gondo would be reviled if he denied the kidnapper’s wishes. Gondo rages and throws Kawanishi out, while giving in, and deciding to risk his fortune to save the boy.
The kidnapper, meanwhile, advises Gondo to put all the unmarked money in two cases of a certain size and toss them out of a speeding train the next morning. He does, after getting a call from the kidnapper while on board the train, and the first part of the film ends with the cops getting only a few clues as to who the kidnapper is, via the return of Shinichi, some still photos, and film taken aboard the train. The scenes, shot on a real train, are superb, and make the similar sorts of bad process shot scenes Hitchcock filmed in several movies seem the lazy and amateurish work they are.
The second half, almost an hour and a half, deals less with Gondo, and more with the slog of police work. This is not a network television crime show where deus ex machinas quickly arise, but a slow and complex undertaking, shown quite realistically for the day. We soon see the nameless kidnapper, who is aggravated that Gondo is hailed as a national hero for forfeiting his fortune for his employee’s son. Why he did it remains a mystery. The film also does not let us see anything of the criminal until this point.
The viewer, thus, is taken along by the narrative, and not two steps ahead of the cops. This instills an emotional investment in even the most mundane actions, for they might be clues. If we know who and why the criminal acts were committed, we’d be bored with the red herrings and disdainful of the characters who could not see what, to the viewer with knowledge, is ‘obvious.’ Why so few crime dramas follow this tack is a mystery; at least if one does not realize that most artists assume they are creating for idiots and thus speak down to them.
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