THE BAD SLEEP WELL d: Akira Kurosawa
Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru / The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Direction: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Eijirô Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Hideo Oguni
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Masayuki Mori, Kyôko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi, Kô Nishimura, Takeshi Katô, Kamatari Fujiwara, Chishu Ryu, Ken Mitsuda
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.
Written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Eijirô Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Hideo Oguni, The Bad Sleep Well’s Shakespearean pedigree and the fact that it’s not set in medieval Japan have resulted in it 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 both well written and superbly paced.
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.)
The bulk of the film’s narrative setup is thus displayed and allowed to unravel for the next two hours. Yet, the plot almost never follows the standard melodramatic arc of having 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 be 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 Toshiro Mifune) is not who he claims to be. Married to the crippled daughter, Yoshiko (Kyôko Kagawa), of the VP of the Public Corporation — under scrutiny because of a kickback scheme involving the contracted company Dairyu Construction — Nishi comes across as a nepotistic corporate climber. It turns out that Nishi is the bastard son of a corporate executive who was forced to commit suicide following a prior scandal. Slowly, methodically, Nishi has planned his vengeance against the corporate leaders.
The company’s vice president, 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. And then there’s the perpetually confused and dour contract officer Shirai (Kô Nishimura), who is driven crazy by visions of another corporate officer who apparently committed suicide, the head accountant Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara). Things, however, aren’t all what they seem to be.
The Bad Sleep Well does a wonderful job of showing the festering corruption that is an inevitable consequence of the 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. At one point, 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.’ Ultimately, it is the long cowed Wada who is correct.
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Tags: Akira Kurosawa, Classic Movies, Crime Movies, Film Reviews, Masayuki Mori, Socially Conscious Movies, Takashi Shimura, The Bad Sleep Well, Toshiro Mifune
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