In addition to a handful of excellent film adaptations, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and English playwright William Shakespeare have one metatextual artistic trait in common: the paradoxical ability to produce a piece of art that is firmly rooted in a native culture but also tends to be interpreted as being incredibly universal. For instance, Kurosawa’s early samurai epics, The Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961), both firmly planted in Japanese culture, became Americanized to great success in The Magnificent Seven (1960) and A Fistful of Dollars (1964). In the meantime, Kurosawa did a bit of adaptation himself, turning the Bard’s MacBeth into Throne of Blood (1957) and King Lear into his masterpiece Ran (1987). However, in the middle of all these adaptations, Kurosawa produced The Bad Sleep Well (1960), an incredibly loose adaptation of Hamlet that fails to reach the quality set by Kurosawa’s more focused efforts.
As previously noted, The Bad Sleep Well is an adaptation of Hamlet that has been shifted to the Japanese corporate world, paving the way for Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000). However, it is incredibly important to note that all the texts really have in common are the overarching themes, and not much else. The Bad Sleep Well, as many have written, was influenced just as much by Hamlet as it was by American film noir and that seems to be partially the problem with the film. Kurosawa is taking all of these inspirations and trying to give them their due. By doing so, he creates a film that clocks in around two and a half hours which, while a longer running length worked for films like The Seven Samurai and Ran, much of The Bad Sleep Well seems irrelevant and redundant.
The film stars, like many Kurosawa films, Toshiro Milfune plays Nishi, the Hamlet figure. The film begins with Nishi marrying the daughter of his boss, Iwabuchi, the president of Public Corporation. During the wedding scene which, like the beginning of Coppolla’s The Godfather, takes up the first half-hour of the film and introduces us to nearly all of the characters, Kurosawa relays to the viewer that Public Corporation and the Dairyu Corporation have entered into some corrupt dealings, which have resulted in mysterious suicides and a police investigation. The wedding scene proves to be an excellent choice to start the film by replacing the play within a play of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by making Nishi aware of his boss’s guilt and simultaneously introducing the characters to the audience.
For a film structured around Nishi’s quest for revenge, Kurosawa structures it in an incredibly flawed manner. For instance, the audience is not given a clear view of Nishi’s character until close to the hour mark. This keeps the Nishi character always at arm’s length to the audience, making it incredibly hard to sympathize with anyone. Kurosawa seems to be doing so to make the identity of the person seeking revenge on the corporations mysterious, but to any well-tuned audience member (or anyone familiar with Hamlet), it is clear in the opening scenes that the person is Nishi.
Flaws aside, The Bad Sleep Well is still worthy of viewing. As Dan Mancini points out in his review at DVD Verdict, “The middle of the picture teeters on the brink of narrative collapse, but rights itself for a rousing conclusion.” There are also some wonderfully constructed sequences within its overlong narrative, especially the scene where one of the corrupt company members is convinced that he is being haunted by the ghost of one of his co-workers who was believed deceased.
On the DVD side of things, Criterion has done a wonderful job restoring the picture and audio, especially the film’s jazzy score. However, from an extras point of view, those expecting the typical Criterion treatment that was given to Ran and Kagemusha will be disappointed. The disc includes the latest episode in a series of documentaries placed on the lower-end Criterion/Kurosawa discs, a theatrical trailer, and a pair of essays: one by Almereyda and another by Chuck Stephens, contributing editor of Film Comment.
Overall, The Bad Sleep Well is given the treatment a mediocre Kurosawa film deserves.
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