Ed note: For the next several weeks, composer and film aficionado Lewis Saul has agreed to supply us with in-depth commentary about the films of Akira Kurosawa, now showing in an extended festival at the Film Forum. Even if you're unable to stop by the Forum, we think Lew's insights will deepen your appreciation of these important movies.
Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well) [1960]
PLAYING on January 26th at The Film Forum
This is Kurosawa's 19th film and the first co-production between his new production company and Toho.
From my reading, it has always seemed that the reason Toho was anxious to have Kurosawa foot the bill for the expensive costs of his films -- and therefore take risks he had never been forced to take previously -- was that he often seemed to choose themes for his films which did not seem "commercial" at first glance. If his next film Yojimbo [1961] {playing February 3rd} had been his 19th film instead of his 20th, I would have thought that this was exactly the case -- Yojimbo seems hand-crafted with an eye towards making a bit hit!
But instead he made this film. A powerful, unflinching (although some still accuse Kurosawa of flinching, in the end [see below]) look at corporate Japan at the beginning of the big economic boom, and the gangsters in suits who ran/run the corporations ...
The Shakespearean connection here (Hamlet) would seem to be the most tenuous of the three (MacBeth/Throne of Blood and Ran/King Lear are the other two) -- and you can read many pages in Goodwin about it -- I'll leave that to you experts. I'm just a dumb musician.
Galbraith's chapter on this film is filled with terrific anecdotes, perhaps because of his relationship with Mike Inoue, Kurosawa's nephew, who had a lot to do with the origins of this very interesting movie:
"When I went to college I wanted to be a scriptwriter. I wrote a script and gave it to my uncle to read. Of course, he received scripts from all over. I wrote my name on the script, and every time I went to see him the script was always under a big pile, and each time I would move it to the top of the stack. One day I went to his birthday party and his wife rushed out to meet me at the front door and said, 'You'll be very happy to know your uncle had nothing to do while he was waiting for the guests to arrive, and he started reading your script.'" After some encouragement and six months more work, Inoue presented his uncle with a script entitled, "Bad Men's Prosperity." "[Kursoawa said], 'The story is very interesting. I might take up the subject for a film, but I'd have to refine the script you wrote. You don't mind, do you?'"
Inoue received no screen credit, but he didn't seem to mind. "Some of the scenes I spent ten pages on he replaced with only one line. I had many sleepless nights writing those scenes, but I have to admit their version was much better, and it wasn't my script anymore."