Castle of Sand (1974)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Castle of Sand (1974) – Y. Nomura

Expert police procedural from Yoshitaro Nomura which follows two detectives trying to solve the murder of an elderly man at a railway station in Tokyo.  The first hour of the film appears to be nothing but dead ends. There are only two clues, the victim’s heavy regional accent and the word “Kameda” overheard by a bar hostess.  Finally, a linguist offers a breakthrough and the investigation gains some traction.  Around the halfway mark, the film starts to transition with a look into the life of the killer (who has already been observed in passing a few times).  As the detectives piece together some amazing clues, we are provided with the killer’s complete backstory revealing his motive, if not justifying it at all.  In some ways, the shape of the film is not too different from Kurosawa’s great High and Low (1963), which is the best police procedural I have seen.  Yet, despite a drawn out sequence during a piano concerto that seeks to reveal the mind of the killer, I still felt he remained opaque (and the film drags at this point, past the two-hour mark).  But the title remains apt – some castles made of sand melt into the sea, eventually (and even though the direct Japanese translation is “sand bowl”, the logic remains the same).  The film looks great in color and widescreen nevertheless.