Ill-Informed Gadfly

“A truly good movie is a really enjoyable movie, too. There’s nothing complicated about it.” –Akira Kurosawa

Kurosawa backs up this statement, uttered in a documentary interview, with “The Bad Sleep Well.” It’s a masterpiece, one that merits consideration alongside Kurosawa’s greatest movies, a list that also includes, by my reckoning, “Stray Dog,” “Ikiru,” “Seven Samurai,” “High and Low” and “Red Beard.” Some will ask, how could you not include “Rashomon” or “Yojimbo”? I don’t know. This may not be defensible, but for me they didn’t have the incredible energy and lifelike texture that characterized Kurosawa’s best work. However you rank his many achievements, these six movies, for me, along with a half-dozen others that are arguably just as good, constitute a body of work that leads me to a startling, if not entirely controversial, conclusion: Kurosawa is the greatest film director of all time.

Kurosawa had been on my short list since I saw “Stray Dog” and “High and Low” back-to-back at the dingy old American Film Institute theater at the Kennedy Center. The other three movies I mentioned only reinforced my conviction about his genius. But it had been a while since I saw something as assured and compelling as “The Bad Sleep Well.” It’s the tipping point in my experience of Kurosawa, the one that, suddenly, gives me the confidence to say that nobody ever did it better.

“The Bad Sleep Well,” released in 1960, is a loose adaptation of “Hamlet.” (Kurosawa also did Shakespeare with “Throne of Blood,” derived from “Macbeth,” and “Ran,” from “King Lear.”) But the key word here is “loose.” Kurosawa toys deliciously with Shakespeare’s sturdy structure, building in action and suspense and thrilling reversals. You’re not even certain who the Hamlet figure is until about an hour into this gripping two-and-a-half-hour saga, although the casting is a big hint. Furthermore, Kurosawa, with a flair that seems effortless, wrangles the story into an indelible portrait of Japan at the time. Many movie lovers think of Kurosawa as foremost a samurai filmmaker, but I think much of his best work was done in a contemporary setting. “Stray Dog,” “Ikiru,” “The Bad Sleep Well” and “High and Low” offer impassioned, sardonic explorations of postwar Japan alongside their crackling human dramas.

In “The Bad Sleep Well,” corporate hierarchy has supplanted both royalty and family; in the opening sequence, executives at the quasi-governmental Public Corporation for Land Development take the place of absent relatives in congratulating Koichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) for his wedding to Keiko (Kyoko Kagawa), the daughter of Public Corp.’s vice president. A gang of news reporters serves as our entry point into this tense, buttoned-down milieu; Public Corp. is involved in corrupt dealings with a contractor, and the reporters, in a brilliant bit of exposition, identify the major players at the wedding to each other and to the audience. The sequence climaxes when someone wheels in a wedding cake in the shape of Public Corp.’s headquarters; a single rose marks the seventh-story window from where, five years earlier, an executive leaped to his death. In a forgivable bit of self-awareness on the part of the screenwriters, one of the reporters pronounces the wedding — which also includes the arrest of a Public Corp. accountant and an impassioned threat to the groom from the bride’s dissolute brother — the best one-act he’s ever seen. Another reporter responds that it’s just the prelude. Kurosawa makes sure he’s true to his word. “The Bad Sleep Well” weaves an intricate web including suicide, attempted murder, a false ghost, doomed romance, filial devotion and a man driven to insanity. It’s not a rosy picture — remember the title — but there’s plentiful black humor, and Kurosawa again proves he’s nonpareil at capturing believable human behavior and recognizable emotion. Every scene is vivid, complex and, as Kurosawa promises, really enjoyable. His mise-en-scène penetrates the inner lives of his characters (Kurosawa used widescreen black-and-white better than anyone). He gets great performances out of his actors, including his two mainstays, Mifune and Takashi Shimura. His depiction of corporate graft has an enduring relevance. And through the journey of his hero, Nishi, he transforms a quest for revenge into a crusade for justice. I don’t want to give away too much — please, discover this movie’s many astonishments for yourself. “The Bad Sleep Well” has everything you could hope for in a movie, and then some.