The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

 Akira Kurosawa's "The Bad Sleep Well"


On his previous film, "The Hidden Fortress," Akira Kurosawa constantly bumped heads with Toho Studios over budget issues. Because of this, he started his own film company, Kurosawa Productions, in 1959. Kurosawa wanted the first film coming out of his new production company to be something with a greater social importance. He managed to achieve that with "The Bad Sleep Well."

"The Bad Sleep Well" is a film about a man who acquires a prominent position in a postwar Japanese company in order to expose the men responsible for his father's death. Kurosawa wanted to use the film to showcase and offer a critique on modern corporate corruption. The film also takes notable inspiration from William Shakespeare's "Hamlet." 

While I did find the ending of the film incredibly engaging, specifically due to what is withholds, I found much of the 2 hours 31 minute runtime to be a rather sluggish affair. I think that the broader themes of the film are very engaging, however, the execution of these themes seemed a little flat. That being said, I do feel like that was a much larger point of the film. For instance, the climax of the film occurs off-camera. As A.V. Club's Keith Phipps puts it, "it's all the more disappointing when a shapeless, anticlimactic, but probably inevitable ending does it in." I felt this ending was the stronger aspect of the film, particularly for the parallels it draws to the real-life disappointment drawn from actual corporate corruption. 

Despite my opinions, "The Bad Sleep Well" is still a masterclass in direction, as well as flagship entry in Kurosawa's filmography. 



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