The Bad Sleep Well
Criterion, $29.95
Akira Kurosawa’s hallowed samurai epics camouflage the Japanese sensei’s facility with shorter, sharper blades (2½ hours instead of three or four). As laid out in an auxiliary featurette, 1960’s The Bad Sleep Well became Kurosawa’s first independent production in the aftermath of costly budget overruns for his original Jedi-knight/princess escapade two years earlier, The Hidden Fortress. Though the latter film was a runaway hit, Kurosawa’s most successful until Yojimbo in 1961, studio parent TOHO insisted the director assume the financial burden of bringing his spectacles in on time for the bottom line. Sandwiched between career peaks, The Bad Sleep Well serves corporate sacrifice – suicide by seventh story window, truck, and volcano – rather than feudal slicing and dicing. As a noir veering into classical tragedy (Hamlet to accompany Throne of Blood‘s Macbeth and Ran‘s King Lear), this lesser-known intrigue scalds with cynicism and wit, echoed in its guiding score: wry, modern, melodramatic. Toshiro Mifune, as a button-down straight-lace who marries into the family of a scandal-ridden government contractor to exact teeth for his disgraced father’s fatal plunge, is typically nuclear. “The law couldn’t bring you to justice, but I’ll do it with my own bare hands,” he proves to one unfortunate crook. Kurosawa’s stock company conjures its usual magic, particularly Kamatari Fujiwara as a coglike toady who reluctantly joins forces with Mifune though he knows it’s a doomed enterprise. “You’re up against a terrifying system that will never yield,” he implores. It doesn’t, the villain’s final phone call from the unseen emperor of sleep twisting a final dagger up under the audience’s rib cage. Sweet dreams.Also Out Now
Scarlet Street (Kino): Fritz Lang’s laughable but effective and long-celebrated 1945 answer to Double Indemnity. Joan Bennett’s no Betty Bacall, Edward G. Robinson nearly upstages his rug, and the Hayes Office took an ice pick to the French source material, but every fever dream contracted after this one-way trip will forever be haunted by whispers of “lazy legs.”Where the Sidewalk Ends (20th Century Fox): Otto Preminger, Gene Tierney, and Dana Andrews’ return to the naked city six years after 1944 landmark Laura. He’s still a cop named Mark – older, bitter, in a jam – while the reptilian liquidity of Tierney’s gaze still paralyzes the male persuasion. Preminger pulls few punches (ditto Gary Merrill), especially in the case of his leading lady. Script by Ben Hecht. Knockout.
This article appears in January 20 • 2006.
