Alternative Film Guide

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:

Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 black-and-white Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru / The Bad Sleep Well, is often compared to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but that’s an inapt comparison. While Shakespeare’s play has a higher sense of poetry, Kurosawa’s film — though a high-class melodrama — has far more relevance, realism, and complexity.

The Bad Sleep Well was written by Kurosawa and four collaborators — Shinobu Hashimoto, Eijirô Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Hideo Oguni. Its Shakespearean pedigree and the fact that it’s not set in medieval Japan have resulted in The Bad Sleep Well not getting its proper due, especially when compared to the acclaim accorded Rashomon, Ikiru, and Seven Samurai. That is unfortunate.

Despite its melodramatic bent and film noir roots — heightened by Masaru Sato’s wonderful score, which alternates the darkness of certain moments with almost carnivalesque music — The Bad Sleep Well is superbly paced and well written.

In its opening sequences at a corporate wedding, fully Westernized to the tune of a Here Comes the Bride rendition, we find jackal-like press members reminiscent of the paparazzi in Federico Fellini’s masterpiece La Dolce vita (released the previous year). Because of a budding scandal, they are ready to pounce on any irregularity. (A subsequent montage of newspaper headlines puts those used by Hollywood in pre-World War II gangster films to shame.)

Thus, the bulk of the film’s narrative setup is displayed and allowed to unravel for the next two hours. However, the narrative in The Bad Sleep Well almost never follows the standard melodramatic arc of allowing the characters’ dumbest possible actions dictate the plot. For this reason, the ending is both realistic and one of the most chilling in film history. In fact, perhaps only the Armageddon scenes in Dr. Strangelove manage to more chilling.

After a lengthy twenty-plus-minute setup in the wedding scenes, the plot thins out and becomes clear for the rest of the 150-minute film.

The corporate executive, Koichi Nishi (a bespectacled Toshirô Mifune), who married the crippled daughter, Yoshiko (Kyôko Kagawa), of the VP of the Public Corporation — under scrutiny in a kickback scheme involving a contracted company called Dairyu Construction — is not who he claims to be. Since the bride is crippled and Nishi comes across as a nepotistic corporate climber, the reporters naturally believe the marriage is a fraud. They gibe each other, like a Greek chorus commenting on the action, until the executives look panicked when the wedding cake arrives, shaped like their corporate office building, with a red X marking a seventh story window where a past executive committed suicide.

Nishi turns out to really be the bastard son of that corporate executive, Furuya, who was forced to commit suicide, after a prior scandal, by jumping out that seventh story window five years earlier. Slowly, methodically, Nishi has planned his vengeance against the corporate leaders — starting with having the cake delivered to his own wedding.

The Vice President, named Iwabuchi (Masayuki Mori) is one of the most restrained and deadly screen villains in history. His assistant, Moriyama — played by the always superb Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura — is almost as evil, but far more craven. Moriyama, however, is not nearly as much the craven and perpetually confused and dour Contract Officer Shirai (Kô Nishimura), who is driven crazy by Nishi by visions of another corporate officer who apparently committed suicide, the head accountant Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara).

But things are not all as they seem. Wada did not kill himself by tossing himself into a volcano, as believed, unlike another executive, Miura, who jumped in front of a speeding truck. Wada was saved by Nishi, and recruited into his revenge plot when taken to his funeral, where the gay music contrasts with the chilling words of the executives that Nishi surreptitiously taped, celebrating Wada’s suicide.

Both the wedding and funeral scenes are perfect sequences that display human and Japanese social behavior at their formal worst, and serve as complementary, if contrasting, set pieces. Also not what it seems, Nishi is not Nishi. He is really Furuya’s son, Itakura. The real Nishi, now Itakura (Takeshi Katô), is his friend, who switched identities with him after Furuya’s funeral, and is his partner in vengeance.

Then, to complicate things further is Iwabuchi’s son Tatsuo (Tatsuya Mihashi), who feels guilt over causing his sister’s crippling accident, loathes his father although he loves the playboy lifestyle it affords him, and swears to kill Nishi at the wedding celebration if he makes his sister unhappy. He and his sister are, in a sense, the clueless wildcards in this tug of war between murderous corporate criminals and zealous vigilantes.

The film does a wonderful job of showing the utter corruption that is inevitable with the eternal corporate mindset that slacks off public responsibility for mere profit, and the particularly Japanese obsession with falling on the sword, so to speak, for one’s superiors. Wada says, ‘You don’t understand bureaucrats. A good official never implicates a superior, no matter what the cost.’ He later tells Nishi, ‘You’re up against a terrifying system that will never yield,’ to which Nishi replies, ‘Everyone feels that way and gives up. That’s how they get away with it.’ But ultimately, it is the long cowed Wada who is correct.

The saddest thing is the corruption this film details is so minor league today that it seems almost childish compared to Enron, Worldcom, and the many others in the years since. In a sense, Iwabuchi isn’t even the top criminal in the film. That would belong to the corporation’s little seen President, Arimura (Ken Mitsuda), who, late in the film, when things seem to be going against the corporation, even sends over a vial of poison for Iwabuchi to do himself in, in case things don’t go well. Ever the corporate toady, Iwabuchi nor only thanks his superior for the vial, but for even telling him the correct dosage needed for death. Watching this film, far more than any of the period pieces put out, explains exactly how the militarists that arose in the early twentieth century were so easily able to lead their country down the path to near oblivion.

Detailing the minutia of plot in this complex film is pretty much pointless, and would make The Bad Sleep Well seem tedious — something it’s not. In fact, Kurosawa’s film is rife with wonderful moments and performances. One such is the scene in which, after kidnapping Moriyama and locking him in the underground ruins of a pre-World War II munitions plant, both Nishi and Itakura go topside to reminisce of the pre-War days. There is a genuine rapport between the two men, while the mise en scène is reminiscent of the finale in The Third Man. Yet, both vigilantes are in many ways as weak and corrupt as every other character in the tale. There is really no likable character in The Bad Sleep Well. In that regard, the film reminds me of the superb 1997 crime thriller L.A. Confidential, save that it’s even bleaker in tone and outlook.

By film’s end, Iwabuchi drugs his daughter, who tells her father where Nishi’s hideout is, after Tatsuo tries to kill her when he overhears that marrying her was merely part of Nishi’s revenge plot. Pretending that the still enraged Tatsuo will kill Nishi, whom Yoshiko loves and has reconciled with, after accepting her father as evil, Iwabuchi gets his information, and sends his henchmen to kill Nishi, Wada, and Moriyama, to cover everything up.

The film ends with Itakura bemoaning the death of his friend, who was shot up with alcohol, and put in a car that was run over by a train. Now, he can never reclaim his real identity, and all the proof that they had of the corporate deceit is gone. He blames Yoshiko, who faints, as Tatsuo protects her. Iwabuchi holds a press conference, pretends to mourn his son-in-law’s death, and then returns to his office. He is confronted by his two children, who disown him. He wants to win them back, but, as they leave, he gets a call from Arimura. He offers to resign, but is told to go on an overseas trip.

That vote of confidence from his superior seems more than enough to bolster his ego, and, as he grovels in thanks for the President’s consideration, all thoughts of his children and myriad crimes seem to dissipate. The word chilling is not enough to describe the ending.

The cinematography, by longtime Godzilla series mainstay Yuzuru Aizawa, is superb. The scenes where Nishi and Wada drive Shirai mad are masterful example of black-and-white lighting that rivals the best of the masterful Carl Theodor Dreyer. And while all the acting is first rate — the always reliable Takashi Shimura as Moriyama; the perfectly restrained evil of Masayuki Mori as Iwabuchi, the wonderfully over-the-top looniness of Kô Nishimura as Shirai; the stellar cravenness of Kamatari Fujiwara as Wada; the semi-incestuous off-kilter performance of Tatsuya Mihashi as Tatsuo; and the hammy, enigmatic Takeshi Katô as Itakura (the real Nishi) — The Bad Sleep Well belongs to Toshirô Mifune as Nishi (the real Itakura).

Unlike his (however terrific) wildly over-the-top work in Rashomon and Seven Samurai, Mifune truly gets to display the full range of his acting chops in his boiling rages — he declares, when trying to toss Shirai out the same window his father fell from, ‘Even now they sleep soundly, with grins on their faces. I won’t stand for it! I can never hate them enough!’ His disguise as a corporate secretary, his acts of kindness that ultimately do him in, and in his tenderly restrained love scenes with Yoshiko, especially one where he tells of how his obsession with his father after his death is only matched by the hatred he felt for the man before his death. His internalized anguish allows Mifune to act with small instead of grand gestures, and scenery chewing gives way to real emoting. Of the three roles I’ve seen him in, this is by far his best.

Curiously, it takes a good half hour of the film’s unfolding before Nishi emerges as the film’s central character and puppet master (even though he turns out to be no match for Iwabuchi, who’s been doing it longer and better). That’s how much confidence Kurosawa has in his cinematic and narrative talents, for imagine a Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts vehicle going a half hour into the plot without a major scene for them. Mifune was that big a star in his day, but the film itself is always bigger.

The DVD, by The Criterion Collection, is shown in a 2.35:1 widescreen ratio, but lacks an English soundtrack, Considering the tremendous amount of white in the film, especially in the wedding scenes, the white subtitles are very difficult to read. There’s also a trailer, and a thirty-three-minute episode of the Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create documentary series on the making of this film.

The insert includes two essays — one by Chuck Stephens, of Film Comment, and one by director Michael Almereyda. The former is a lightweight take on the film and the latter a strained attempt at, yet again, linking the film to Hamlet.

Despite such senseless flagellations, The Bad Sleep Well is an excellent film, and every bit as worthy of being talked about as a masterpiece, as are Ikiru and Seven Samurai. if only because of the weak end of Rashomon, The Bad Sleep Well is even better than that universally acknowledged classic, and despite the melodrama it’s also far better than almost all the American film noirs I’ve seen.

If Shakespeare teaches one thing it’s that the difference between true drama and melodrama is often only the excellence of its presentation. On that score, The Bad Sleep Well is great drama, even if in the real world the bad really do sleep well.

© Dan Schneider

Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru / The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Director: Akira Kurosawa. Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura.

Writer, critic, and poet Dan Schneider is the editor of Cosmoetica, which he describes as “the most popular non-commercial literary site online.”

Other reviews by Dan Schneider can be found at Cinemension, Cosmoetica’s “film division.”

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.

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