Film Friday: Akira Kurosawa's 'The Bad Sleep Well' – Shakespearean Noir

The best known films by director Akira Kurosawa are set in a Japan populated by samurai, princesses, sage elders and horses. But he was also skilled at making films in modern Japan, where corporate boardrooms, compact apartments and post-World War II ruins are used in place of smoky forests and muddy battlefields. These films could be just as engaging as Seven Samurai, Rashamon or Kagemusha. One such film set in a modern society that's just as dangerous as a medieval one is 1960's The Bad Sleep Well.

Even though it is set in contemporary Japan, Kurosawa still found a way to transpose Shakespeare to Japanese society. In The Bad Sleep Well, he finds a modern Hamlet in Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune), who marries Iwabuchi's (Masayuki Mori) daughter Yoshiko (Kyoko Kagawa) in a complicated plan to seek revenge for his father's death. Iwabuchi is the head of the powerful and corrupt Public Corp., which has just handed a deal to a private company that reeks to prosecution. In his pursuit of revenge, Nishi hopes to pull the curtain down on corruption in Japan's post-war business world.

While the film doesn't stick to its Shakespearean roots as well as Throne of Blood sticks to Macbeth for example, you still feel the Bard's pen at the heart of its screenplay. There's theatrical set pieces, with the press acting like a Greek chorus during the film's famous 20-minute wedding opening. Political maneuvering inside the Public Corp. is key to the plot. And an unexpected love reaches a tragic conclusion.

But there is another element at play in this film. Like his ability to shift the Western to Japan, Kurosawa easily adapted the American film noir style to Japan. Considering actual American noir films themselves mixed Shakespeare with modern tragedy, it's not hard to see why Kurosawa found it so easy to bring the two together himself.

Despite color being much more frequently used in Japan by 1960, Kurosawa remained dedicated to black and white, allowing cinematographer Yuzuru Aizawa to make fantastic compositions with the wide frame. Since Kurosawa began using Tohoscope (which was similar to Cinemascope in Hollywood) with The Hidden Fortress, he showed unparalleled understanding of how to frame an image. There's a wonderful shot of Mifune sitting at the exact center of the frame, with Takeshi Kato on one side and Kamatari Fujiwara on the other. Kurosawa uses Mifune like a window pane as Mifune delivers a speech about Nishi's next move and reveals the different expressions on the other actor's faces.

The Bad Sleep Well also works well because Kurosawa and his four co-writers figured out a way to get maximum mileage out of a rather simple plot. Despite the film's 150-minute runtime, it doesn't feel that long. (Similarly, I can never believe that Seven Samurai is over 200 minutes. I refuse to believe that.) Kurosawa keeps us engaged, even when Mifune is out of the picture on long stretches. His character is sort of like Batman, pulling strings and making moves to cause paranoia among his enemies without being in the picture. And the film continues to make new twists and turns that make each act as engrossing as the last. Each hour begins and ends with new revelations and we must see how these play out and effect our characters.

But there are some things that don't work in The Bad Sleep Well that have kept it in the shadows of Kurosawa's towering epics. Mifune's performance is much more restrained and less powerful. Sure, that's part of the character, but his bottled rage comes forth rarely in the film. It's also hard to believe how Mifune and Kagawa's characters could have fallen in love, especially with Yoshiko so underdeveloped. She exists merely as a human pawn, with little to do but be worried. The tragic conclusion (which I won't completely spoil) is also only shown after the fact.

Still, with a film that has roots in noir and Hamlet, we cannot expect a happy ending. Kurosawa makes the Nishi a character with his own demons, leaving us with no one to really root for. We know the corporation is evil, we know the people who run it are corrupt to the bone and now we know that our protagonist has a one-track mind, set on revenge. The film practically exists as a PSA against revenge. Sure, prosecutors can't always stop corruption, but what happens when you kill a handful of executives? More just sprout up, with empty hands waiting to be filled by money.

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