THE BAD SLEEP WELL / WARUI YATSU HODO YOKU NEMURU (1960)

Prime Akira Kurosawa, but for Stateside audiences, inevitably in the shadow of THE HIDDEN FORTRESS/’58, made right before it, later poached by Gary Lucas for STAR WARS/’77; and YOJIMBO/’61 right after, refitted by Sergio Leone as A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS/’64.* So it’s ironic that this hugely enjoyable, slightly batty contemporary thriller is itself similarly lifted, not from a another film, but from Shakespeare’s HAMLET.  And Kurosawa ain’t shy about his source, keeping every major character other than Gertrude in some equivalent role.  Relations are altered (Ophelia & Laertes now kids of Claudius), and the politics are corporate rather than kingly, but we do get a ghost (insane rather than dead), even a Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern as hitmen.  The film opens with a variation on the dumb-show that precedes the play-within-a-play in HAMLET.  It's set at a formal wedding of convenience with Kurosawa laying on Western cultural influences as a sign of corruption between a public & a private company, using English terms that have no Japanese equivalent and playing Wagner & Mendelssohn for the processions.  Cops & reporters swarm in, taking pics & making arrests of corrupt execs between courses.  Toshiro Mifune is the groom, son of a dead exec who’s marrying the crippled daughter of the company head as part of a long-planned revenge that’s compromised when he starts to fall in love with her.  What a rogue & peasant slave is he!  Brilliantly designed, plotted and arranged to critique contemporary Japanese corporate culture, it could well stand losing twenty minutes.  And there’s an odd decision to tell, rather than show, much of the climax.  But an excellent Kurosawa gateway film compared to the late period epics which get so much attention.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Yet it’s this film, rather than YOJIMBO (or its less-acclaimed, if superior sequel, SANJURO/’62) that feels like a Sergio Leone film.  Even a catchy theme for our whistling hero.

DOUBLE-BILL: His next contemporary thriller, HIGH AND LOW/’63, a Rich Man/Poor Man child ransom story, finds Kurosawa reversing method to even better results on a film that brings formal design and structure to a pulp novel.  OR: For a regulation HAMLET, Laurence Olivier’s effectively trimmed 1948 unit-set film noir version.