THE BAD SLEEP WELL: The cinematic impact and influence on the Movie Brat Pack of the 1970s

THE BAD SLEEP WELL - TOHO

Over the course of his lengthy and illustrious career, Japanese filmmaking legend and auteur Akira Kurosawa became most famous for making samurai films. From classics like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo to features that inspired classics like The Hidden Fortress, his filmography is chock full of sword-and-sandal epics that continue to inspire audiences and filmmakers to this day. With such a dense collection of films, it is easy to overlook the few contemporary features Kurosawa made, specifically, his exploration of the film-noir genre, including the 1960 flawed masterpiece The Bad Sleep Well.

The Bad Sleep Well is the first film Kurosawa made under the banner of his own independent production company, and the second of three film-noirs the director produced (the others being High and Low and Stray Dog). Kurosawa's film is most immediately noticeable for its critique of corporate culture and evil company men whose first duty is to money. Frequent Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune stars in his most understated role as a man bent on revenge against the corporate crooks who forced his father to jump out of a window to avoid exposing their secrets. 

In its intricate plotting, air of conspiracy, and paranoid characters The Bad Sleep Well calls to mind 1970s American paranoid thrillers like The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, and All the President’s Men. That latter having much more in common with Kurosawa’s film than meets the eye. The first 25 to 30 minutes of The Bad Sleep Well takes place from the point of view of a group of reporters covering the wedding of the Dairyu Construction Company’s Vice President’s daughter to Mifune’s character, Nishi. These reporters provide the necessary exposition for a film with such a large cast of characters. In fact, this wedding scene involving nefarious players was a significant inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s similarly shadowy American classic The Godfather, with Coppola's first act more or less taking direct influence.

All the President’s Men is a relatively straightforward (cinematically-speaking) thriller that utilises a visually striking use of split-dioptre shots of the two central characters working the case. The Bad Sleep Well is not quite as ostentatious, it features plenty of compositions that manage to fit multiple characters into a frame at various distances, a filmmaking element that is fluent in the work of Brian DePalma. These wonderfully staged and framed shots — which evoke geometric patterns like triangles and squares with their placement of characters — heighten the claustrophobic atmosphere making the characters feel like pawns in a chess game, which they often are. All of Kurosawa’s films feature stunning composition, but The Bad Sleep Well features some of the director’s best work.

Martin Scorsese — the famed auteur who also began his career around the same time as Coppola — is well-known to have taken inspiration from Kurosawa’s films. The Bad Sleep Well is no exception. While there are no direct comparisons plot-wise, the juggling of many characters, dynamic camera movements, and fluid editing are all cinematic techniques on display on this film and in most of Scorsese’s oeuvre. Although The Bad Sleep Well tackles morally ambiguous characters with perfectly-lensed photography and an impeccable sense of direction, there are two significant flaws that prevent the film from being Kurosawa’s unsung masterpiece. The first is a flaw that the director struggled with throughout his career and one that his successor Scorsese continues to flail at to this today; the creation of strong female characters. Both directors excel at creating complicated men, but when it comes to their women they cannot seem to rise beyond the screaming or to nurture. With rare exceptions, women in their films are often side-lined and are not compelling. 

In The Bad Sleep Well that is unfortunate because the main female character plays a pivotal role in the plot and triggers the final act of the film. Nishi’s wife and the Vice President’s daughter, the disabled Yoshiko, is supposed to be the driving force for a change in Nishi. He married her for political purposes, but his eventual falling in love with her might cause him to change his course of action. The problem is that Kurosawa forgets the age-old rule of storytelling: show, do not tell. He tells the audience (over and over again) that Nishi has fallen for Yoshiko but it is never overly shown except for in one forced scene that harms the film significantly.

The other major issue is with the film’s end. It ends on a famously pessimistic note, but one cannot help but feel that something is missing. Kurosawa chooses not to show the audience what happened to Nishi and opts again to tell. Much of the power that could have been derived from a cyclical and depressing end that follows through on the title’s promise is lost. Nevertheless, this element is famously and perfectly replicated by Coppola in his magnum opus The Godfather Part II, of whom the Italian American director capitalises on this restraint with significant emotional brutality by seeing Michael coil over the death of his brother and not the event itself.

Nonetheless, The Bad Sleep Well was and is an incredible stylistic influence for American auteurs of the 1970s and remains a gripping tale of greed, corruption, and the corrosion of an initially noble quest for revenge. Mifune’scontrolling and mannered performance, Kurosawa’s use of shadows, light, and geometric space, and the layered release of exposition to keep track of a large ensemble make this one worth remembering.