THE BAD SLEEP WELL Movie Review

The Worse You Are, the Better You Sleep
Waru Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru

Filmed during the break between two of Kurosawa's greatest action epics. The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo, The Bad Sleep Well is a well-crafted but ultimately unfocused thriller about high-level government corruption. Toshiro Mifune—secretary to a corrupt corporate bigshot—marries his boss's daughter during the film's stunning opening sequence. The marriage ceremony concludes with the arrival of a wedding cake in the shape of an office building, and placed in one “window” of the building is a single rose—it's the window from which a former employee plunged to his death years before. The man who died—unbeknownst to his new father-in-law—was Mifune's father, and Mifune has sworn to find out the true circumstances of his mysterious death, officially labeled a suicide by the company. Ultimately Mifune gets to the bottom of things, but by then The Bad Sleep Well reveals such a bleak and corrupt landscape that the film can only end one way, and does. One of the few Kurosawa pictures that gets less interesting as it goes along, The Bad Sleep Well nevertheless contains a number of memorable moments, including that truly unforgettable wedding sequence.

NEXT STOP … Stray Dog, Z, JFK

1960 135m/B JP Toshiro Mifune, Masayuki Kato, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura, Akira Nishimura; D: Akira Kurosawa; W: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Riyuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni; C: Yuzuru Aizawa; M: Masaru Sato. VHS HMV, COL