Then there is the scene when Shinichi is rescued, and he and Jun go off to play, but his father, the chauffer, rebukes his son for not being of more help. We see and feel the man’s shame and regret at the turn of events. He feels it is his fault that his son caused the ruin of his boss. Thus, he resents his son’s not understanding what really occurred. Later, he and the boy try to play amateur detective, until the police catch up with them. Kurosawa also is a master at tension building, but in an existential manner; not in the puppetmastering that Hitchcock used, which guided actions, not deeper motives. Take a look at the scenes on the train, and where Gondo realizes why the kidnapper specified a certain size for the bags. He seems to realize the cops won’t catch the kidnapper, but then he sees Shinichi on a hillside, and joy infects him. We see that Gondo is really not a heartless businessman, like his shoe rivals. Tension builds and is released in that scene due to an hour’s worth of dialogue and character development beforehand, not because the characters are worried a psychopath with blow up the train in typical Hollywood style.
Filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer once opined about mood defining a story. He stated:
Imagine we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. In an instant, the room we are sitting in is completely altered: everything in it has taken on another level; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed.…This is the effect I want to get.
Alfred Hitchcock used this ploy in one of his best films, Rope, whose entirety is sort of an inverse of this film’s first 55 minutes, while Kurosawa follows a parallel track in regards to character.
What changes in the scene on the train is not a willful manipulation of a character, by a screenwriter, but an organic and believable flowering into character, due to circumstances that are not contrived. Instead of knowing of a corpse behind the door, the audience’s first hour has let us become that corpse, or thing, with knowledge of itself. In essence, we know what Gondo will do because his character has been so skillfully revealed, despite many seeming moments that paint him as something other than his true self. That the remainder of the film shows a more complacent Gondo (check out the scene where he whistles as he mows his own lawn) is, thus, not in the least implausible, for it is the logical outcome of all that has gone before.
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