Another extraordinary crime film from Akira Kurosawa, this one dealing with corporate corruption. What I found most remarkable was the story-telling, of which the opening scene is an extraordinary example. It starts theatrically with a group of waiters making a greeting line in front of a lift. The doors slide open, and we get a wedding party. The door opens again and this time it’s a whole gaggle of paparazzi, who will act as a Greek chorus, doing quite a bit of exposition, telling us who the main characters are, filling in background, contradicting or elaborating upon what the characters themselves are telling us. It’s a wedding, a happy occasion but after the first 30 seconds the drama begins. We see that the bride is crippled, walking on crutches with one foot higher than the other. The father is the head of the corporation. The groom is poor. Did he marry her just for her money? As the wedding banquet proceeds, the police arrive, we see messages of an imminent arrest passed around and on top of it, the brother says if the groom doesn’t make his sister happy he’ll kill her. After the nervous applause dies down, the wedding cake gets brought in. But there are two, one of them a scale-model of a building where a man jumped off the seventh floor, with a rose marking the exact spot, linking the current scandal and some of the top managers who work there to the previous one where they had worked at before. As one of the journalists says at the end of the opening scene, ‘A funny wedding, the best one-act play I ever saw’. ‘A one-act play,’ says another. This is merely a prelude’. And indeed a newspaper appears on the screen, ‘A big scandal unfolding. Police raid Dairyu. A chain of investigations’. The main narrative is well and truly on its way. It’s fantastically told visually (the choice of shots and compositions), musically (the abruptness with which the music often stops), the use of close-ups to single out individuals, how every beat in the story adds information whilst increasing the drama.
It is really superb and so is the rest of the film. A revenge film in which Mifune seeks to avenge his father’s death by destroying the life of the father of his wife. It’s supposedly influenced by Hamlet, though I can at best detect a loose resemblance. The themes are however Shakespearean, a man destroying his life to keep his position, a young man seeking to write wrongs who commits even worse ones, a wife torn between love for her husband and duty to her father. It’s a film where no one wins except the viewer.
Tony Zhou has a very fine short essay on Kurosawa’s compositions in The Bad Sleep Well, which you can see here.
PS I see now from wiki that ‘ Francis Ford Coppola has listed The Bad Sleep Well as one of his favorite films, citing the first thirty minutes of the film “as perfect as any film I’ve ever seen” and used it as inspiration for the wedding sequence in the 1972 Oscar-winning gangster drama The Godfather,’ which makes all kinds of sense.
José Arroyo