The bad sleep well โทช โร ม ฟ เนะ

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Continuing his legendary collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune as a young executive who hunts down his father’s killer, Kurosawa combines elements of “Hamlet” and American film noir to chilling effect in exposing the corrupt boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan. Screening in 35mm.

“...An aggressive and chilling drama of modern-day Japan, exposing a fringe of ‘big business’ in the forthright manner of an American gangster film…. It is to Kurosawa's credit that he has staged what amounts to cliches in this type of strongarm fiction in a way that makes them seem fresh and as fully of sardonic humor as though we had never seen their likes before.” —Bosley Crowther, New York Times (1963)

Even a lesser film by a major filmmaker is still worth seeing. When a director of Akira Kurosawa’s caliber makes a film that doesn’t match his other work, it’s usually head and shoulders above most of the rest of other people’s outputs anyway. The Bad Sleep Well is not a bad film at all—in fact, it’s a very good film. It’s an earnest and even fairly angry movie about a highly contemporary subject—the porous and unsavory relationships between business and government—but it feels more like the first draft of a story that needed to be slimmed down, tightened up, given more focus and clarity before it could be filmed. There’s so much incidental detail that the impact of the story is heavily diluted, and we get the sense of a much better movie inside this one waiting to be revealed either via a rewrite or a heavy editing job.

I feel almost unkind dwelling on what’s wrong with Bad. Most of the movie’s problems are in the first twenty to thirty minutes, and in a way that only compounds the issue: one has to sit through a terribly tedious first act before the film manages to finally get all of its ducks in a row and present you with what appears to be the real story. Once all of this is out of the way, though, it becomes an almost entirely different film—one more akin to a cold-blooded European thriller like Diabolique, where people’s weaknesses are ruthlessly exploited while others dismiss their fears as paranoia or nonsense. Unfortunately, that film, too, has problems—not fatal ones, but enough to take what could have been a great movie and turn it into a strangely tiresome and detached one.

The opening scene is a very Kurosawa-esque setup: it’s a wedding between Nishi (Kurosawa stalwart Toshiro Mifune) and Yoshiko (Kyoko Kagawa) the daughter of the vice president of the Public Corporation for Land Development, Iwabuchi (Masayuki Mori). While people nervously make speeches and police detectives silently wait in the wings to arrest key players, a gaggle of press corpsmen (Kurosawa loves to use crowds, of course) helpfully comment from the sidelines on who’s who and what their significance is. It’s a terribly stodgy storytelling device, but Kurosawa tries to make the best of it with some very nicely delineated acting and a few excellently timed edits.

The police, as it turns out, have come for Wada (Kamatari Fujiawara), a company accountant who doctored the books to prevent others from learning that Public Co. had rigged the bidding on several important land-use contracts—a scandal that may have caused a former employee named Furuya to either commit suicide or be killed. Someone is well aware of who is responsible for all the behind-the-scenes perfidy, and one of the more ominous signs of same is when the wedding cake delivered to the party (in the shape of Public Co.’s own building, no less) has a red rose sticking out of the very window Furuya plunged to his death from.

Wada’s also been pressured into killing himself, to take the company’s ugly machinations to the grave, but Nishi steps in and persuades the man to help him get revenge. Nishi is also Iwabuchi’s secretary: it’s all too clear that he’s the “Deep Throat” inside the company leaking bits of information to the police. With Wada believed dead by all, Nishi uses him to orchestrate a (sometimes ludicrous) campaign of terror against various corrupt men of power—all for the sake of Furuya, his illegitimate father.

This is all a great deal more confusing than it needs to be, unfortunately, and part of the problem is how little seems to be happening. Many of the best recent TV shows—24, The West Wing, Lost, Nip & Tuck, etc.—have found ways to intelligently economize, to do away with most of the time-wasting that still preoccupies many feature films. I hope I don’t sound like I’m simply calling Kurosawa old-fashioned, but Bad’s storytelling has just not aged well. Also, many of his films did not use unconventional or highly compressed storytelling (the one grand exception being, of course, Rashomon), but worked just fine without them and still stand.

The film works a bit better once we see Nishi in action. There is a splendid sequence involving some embezzled money, where Nishi elegantly frames another man to cast doubt on his overall behavior, and which unfolds in a very Hitchcockian way: instead of chases and shoot-outs, it’s about precise timing and looking completely unperturbed when things go exactly according to plan. His target, by the way, instead of being written off (as he most likely would have been), winds up sticking around in the story and becoming progressively more paranoid and deranged. A little of this goes a long way, and there are several too many scenes of him standing around and looking hollow-eyed. Instead of being atmospheric, it’s just plain static. Some fundamental tension in the film is missing, and this is just one example of that.

This might work better if the conflicts were more upfront, but Nishi—the engineer of his paranoia—is not all that interesting as a character either. Mifune portrays the man in a highly restrained, almost offhand way—so much so that he hardly seems to be breaking a sweat. It makes sense in the light of what we’re seeing, since this man cannot afford the luxury of fury in front of others, but it makes for a very smothered and never terribly compelling role. Worse, the more we learn about Nishi’s ambitions—and, most importantly, what he had to execute to get where he is now—the more we wish we were watching his story and not the one Kurosawa gives us. There are too many scenes of things being explained instead of shown, mulled over instead of demonstrated.

All right. Let me stop undercutting the movie and talk about what actually does work; I’m starting to sound like someone’s mom. Even if Mifune’s performance doesn’t suit the material, it’s still a good performance. He was a fine actor even when he was in minor films like Ambush at Blood Pass; his existing persona was enough to carry a film single-handedly. He uses that charisma to elevate individual scenes in Bad out of the murk of the plot, as when he reduces one of his nemeses to a sniveling wreck in a darkened office room. I also liked the grimy atmosphere of the last stretch of the movie, where the heroes (and one hostage) try to out-wait their adversaries in the wrecked, leaking remains of a wartime factory—one of the very lands that Public Co. was probably intent on developing.

These images also underscore one of the movie’s subtler and more thoughtful concerns—what the cost was to Japan’s soul for emerging from the rubble of WWII and turning into an international economic superpower. Maybe the cost of all progress is corruption, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fended off. The philosophy of Bad falls nicely in line with other Kurosawa films: the one vanguard against the evils that almost inevitably comes with conformist society is the enlightened individual. It’s just a shame that he could not find a more elegant and cohesive story for his message, one that didn’t cry out to be shorn of half an hour or more.