The Bad Sleep Well

The film opens on a wedding and that section runs twenty-five minutes. The room is full of executives from a large public corporation; the groom is Nishi, a young secretary marrying the vice-president's daughter. The press waits outside because a corruption investigation is running the same day. Then the cake arrives: shaped like an office building, with a rose fixed to a window on the seventh floor. Years ago a man fell from that window and it was called suicide. Nishi did not join this company by accident. His name, his identity and his marriage are a plan, and he has given years to exposing the men responsible for his father's death one by one. That is where the film is merciless: the revenge proceeds, but what he faces is not a person, it is an institution, and an institution has no face to lose. Akira Kurosawa directed, with Toshiro Mifune as Nishi. This was the first film from Kurosawa Production, founded in April 1959, meaning the director was his own producer for the first time. The story is built as a modern reading of Hamlet, with the wedding standing in for the play within the play. Who it is for: anyone who likes Kurosawa's contemporary films and hard stories about corporate corruption. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the hero to win. It runs close to two and a half hours, the middle is heavy going, and the ending is entirely bleak.