Film review: The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

This is a less-known Kurosawa, in part because it's set in the present day (although, so are Ikiru and High and Low, so...)  It does star Mifune, but he is, for the most part, rather low-key.  It has a number of plot similarities with Hamlet, so you could lump it in with Throne of Blood (Macbeth) and Ran (King Lear) for a nice little trilogy, but it also has enough differences to make that stretching it a bit.  What to say about it?  It's beautiful, for one thing: very film noir in its use of shadows and pools of light and practically every frame is arranged geometrically.  I'm normally bad at noticing things like that, but it's impossible to miss in this one.
The film starts with a wedding - a very western wedding: they play the Wedding March and there's a giant cake.  But it's being held in what looks like a boardroom of a company, and it's very much a Company Affair.  The bride is the daughter of the Vice President (we never meet the President in the film, I now realize) and the groom, his trusted secretary, is an almost unrecognizable bespectacled Mifune.  The place is teeming with reporters who comment cynically about the proceedings, which are happening, it emerges, in the midst of a scandal for the company (and another company - it's hard to keep track of the machinations).  A couple of speeches are given (the second by the bride's brother, who is drunk, a pretty much constant state of affairs for him) which are very undiplomatic about the fact that the bride is disabled, and that we should pity her.  One leg is significantly shorter than the other and she has to use a crutch.  The brother's speech actually ends with him threatening the groom not to mistreat his poor sister.  Then the cake is wheeled in and it's a giant model of a building, with a rose sticking out of window on one of the upper floors.  The significance of this is that a member of the board of this company committed suicide by jumping out of that very window.  Shocked gasps all round.  Next we get a montage of various attempted convictions of members of the company, one of which is foiled because the President tells him that he should "take things to the bitter end" and he throws himself in front of a truck.  Basically, everybody in power gets off scot free because the cops either can't get their hands on key evidence or their witnesses kill themselves.  (I'm a bit confused about this part, the first 30 odd minutes of the film, because we watched it on the Criterion Channel a couple of days ago and it froze totally, so we took up again last night at that point.)  We then watch another, particularly squirrelly little man (Wada) trudging up the side of what looks like a volcano, trying to steel himself to throw himself over the edge.  Suddenly, from nowhere, it seems, Mifune is there, and we get introduced to the real plot of the film.  He gives Wada a stern lecture about how the system is corrupt and does he really want to be sacrificing himself for the good of those above him?  Cut to a scene of the higher-ups discussing how Wada has in fact committed suicide.  But it turns out, Mifune (who goes by the name of Nishi, even though it emerges that that is not his real name), has got him in hiding, watched by a friend (who, we find out later, is the real Nishi).  Mifune is in fact the illegitimate son of the man who jumped from the window.  He hated his father while he was alive, because his father dumped his mother and him on the orders of The Company to marry a "more suitable" wife.  But after his death he found out that his father had set up a savings account for him and had put huge chunks of his salary in there.  So, with new-found affection for his father, he concocted a scheme for revenge, which involved first becoming the trusted secretary of Vice President Iwabuchi, and then his son-in-law.  However, in what will prove to be his undoing, "Nichi" is too soft at his core and he has really fallen in love with the daughter.  In one of the most visually satisfying sections of the film, he torments one of Iwabuchi's key henchmen by having Wada emerge from the shadows as he (the henchman) is walking home in the dark.  This happens enough that the henchman starts to lose it, to the extent that Iwabuchi hires a hitman to get rid of him.  But "Nichi" intercedes, only to take the henchman to the very room his father committed suicide from.  He even dangles him out of the window, but doesn't have the heart in the end to kill him.  (The man goes crazy instead.)  Unfortunately, another assistant to Iwabuchi investigates and finds out who Mifune is, and the bride's brother, overhearing the conversation between this assistant (played by the other famous Kurosawa actor, Takashi Shimura) and Iwabuchi, angrily chases Mifune out of the house with a shotgun.  However, the two Nishis then kidnap the Shimura character and are getting him to crack about all the secrets of the company when Wada runs away and comes back with Mifune's bride because he wants true love to blossom.  BUT, just when everything's going right, she reveals to her father where the Nishis are (because the scheming bastard convinces her he's guilt-stricken, and gets her to believe that her brother is hunting for her husband with a gun (turns out he's just hunting).  And... cue very bleak ending.
What can I say?  Whaddya expect when it's influenced by Hamlet?  But it's definitely a very good Kurosawa - not quite High and Low, but I liked it better than, say, Drunken Angel or even Stray Dog.  It is indeed a film noir, and a very good one.