It would be a stretch to call any Kurosawa film feminist. At best, his female characters are benign and background, with rare exception; at worst, they are nasty villains. I tend to overlook this when watching his films because the depth of his compassion is overwhelming. It's clear that he was a person who loved humanity and the downtrodden among us; his blindspot is unfortunate but not a quality that completely ruins his filmography. What made me bring this up here is that The Bad Sleep Well, while by no means portraying a strong female character of any traditional sort, does manage to have an interesting twist that could be seen as (unintentionally?) feminist in a forgiving light.

This film…

#madlad Mifune

'It's not easy hating evil. You have to stoke your own fury until you become evil yourself.'

I said in my last review of The Hidden Fortress that I wished for more than just thrills derived from the bare plot. Well, now I must contradict myself because in The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa chisels narrative cinema to perfection. He takes the classic revenge trope, and paints it with tears of charcoal cynicism to craft an intricately paced political-moral tale of corruption – but with the morals tumbling headfirst into the abyss.

Mifune's character is the star of the show. His calm, stoical exterior is betrayed by his violent outbursts of rage at the people against whom he harbors…

The problem with corporations is that they become too big to tackle. What may start off born from individuals quickly becomes autonomous, an amorphous and intangible beast that exists almost-purely in abstractions, but the regulations established come to bind its creators. Eventually it becomes an independent entity, the greed and selfishness of its workers fueling its very longevity.

So what is the best way to survive in such a stomach? You climb, crawling over others if needed, until you ascend to the top of the corporate ladder (or at least as high as you can go). From there you're protected from the most immediate dangers, but you also need to keep those down below in control. This requires payment. Do…

The Bad Sleep Well has a superb opening set piece, featuring an arrest at a wedding. It is told through the perspective of the press and the tension of just what is going to happen is hypnotically engrossing. It takes real formal confidence to attempt a twenty minute scene like that. By this point in his career, Akira Kurosawa was rightly confident. The Bad Sleep Well is one of his best looking films. His camera is calm and steady, as this is a film often of long takes. The visual sensibility matches Kurosawa's later film High and Low, being clinical and calculated, like a crime scene investigation. That totally matches the utterly cynical view of power that the film unloads.…

Ikiru and Seven Samurai broadened Kurosawa's postwar critique to implicate deeper historical flaws in Japanese culture, and The Bad Sleep Well brings his criticisms of past and present into sharp focus in its depiction of the way that contemporary, westernized corporate culture in Japan adds a new twist to more traditional behaviors of sacrifice and even suicide for one's betters. The embezzlement and elaborate capitalist fraud may be new, but expecting your underlings to pay for your shame with their lives is older than Tokyo's name. I've heard the ending has come in for criticism, but to me it is one of the most furious and bleak in Kurosawa's oeuvre, no mean feat for the man who crafted the belligerently…

Formalism and futility clash over corrupt deeds in Akira Kurosawa’s boardroom noir, “The Bad Sleep Well.” 

The film is an uncommitted adaption of “Hamlet,” with elements of “The Count of Monte Cristo” also incorporated. Kurosawa more uses the classic works as loose frameworks, though; purloining key elements and themes of each, while being faithful to neither. Of the two, “Sleep” certainly hews closer to Shakespeare’s masterpiece of royal intrigue and familial deception. 

“Bad’s” opening half hour is the fulcrum and crown of its entire construction. Taking inspiration from “Hamlet’s” meta-play, “The Mousetrap,” Kurosawa uses it to introduce the film’s large roster of interconnected characters. Seeing, from the outset, the reaction of the dramatis personae to this allegation unveils their web…

Decades Project: 3/6 of the 60's

"It's not easy hating evil. You have to stoke your own fury until you become evil yourself."

The Bad Sleep Well is so carefully and intricately plotted that it's hard to say much about it without heading into spoiler territory. It's a tale of corporate corruption which takes inspiration from Shakespeare's Hamlet and brings the characters into present day Japan. Structurally it plays out like a backwards version of High and Low, beginning with a police procedural grounded in strict realism and slowly becoming smaller and more intimate as we learn who's working for whom. Needless to say, the film is a bit hard to follow (much like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*), but Kurosawa…

destroying multiple lives and destining your children to hate you for the sake of a corporate position that will never grant you respect, sustainability or a future retirement. what if Hamlet didn’t get to carry out his revenge and instead lingered on the precipice of true vengeance, making his final moments a cruel disillusioned pursuit to a task that would never be fulfilled. brief moments of true connection in a lawless world, inevitably drowned out by the machinations of capitalism and corporate ideology, as the friends and family scorned scream in anguish as the suits wonder when it’ll be their time to be pushed out of a window for power. Kurosawa’s most bitter film I’ve seen so far, one that…

It's always thrilling to watch the antagonism between good and evil, morality and corruption, justice and moral decay. Kurosawa exposes the tentacles of corporate corruption among powerful men and their dominance over subordinates willing to die as martyrs to sustain this sick system and cover up gaps that could incriminate their superiors. Here, the plot invites an intriguing reflection: how far is a person willing to go for a blind, manipulative, cold, and cruel system that only uses them as a puppet for greater interests, as if no one truly owns their destiny.

Amidst all this, a personal revenge torments the heart of a man, an indirect victim of this system's consequences. And here begins the most exciting conflict: character…

”Cattle and swine die kinder deaths”

...and something is rotten in the state of the Dairyu Construction Company

So it is with Kurosawa’s gorgeous noir film that comes complete with corporate greed, family drama and obsessive plots of revenge. The black and white cinematography looks fantastic and if I can ever find it playing on the big screen I’m totally there.

In the tradition of all classic noir films, I really had to concentrate the entire way through to keep track of who was who and what was going on. There’s some fantastic setups like Wada watching his own funeral while listening to a tape of his bosses discussing him in a nightclub the night before as well as the…