The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru; Akira Kurosawa, 1960)

At the wedding of lame-legged Yoshiko Iwabuchi (Kyôko Kagawa), daughter of the vice-president  (Masayuki Mori) of the Land Development Corporation, Kōichi Nishi (Toshiro Mifune), the secretary of President Arimura (Ken Mitsuda), a group of reporters watch as Assistant Chief Wada (Kamatari Fujiwara) is arrested on bribery charges involving likely kickbacks. The reporters note a parallel to an earlier incident involving Iwabuchi, Administrative Officer Moriyama (Takashi Shimura), and Contract Officer Shirai (Kô Nishimura), which was left unsolved after Wada's predecessor Furuya committed suicide by jumping from a 7th-story window. The wedding cake is also in the shape of the building where Furuya killed himself, with a rose sticking from the 7th floor. The police interrogate Wada and Managing Director Miura (Gen Shimizu) about the Corporation bribing government officials. Prompted by a letter he receives, Miura commits suicide by running in front of a truck. Nishi stops Wada when he in turns tries to kill himself by jumping into an active volcano. Allowing the world to believe him dead, Nishi takes Wada to his own funeral, where he plays a tape recording of his bosses plotting his death, persuading him to help him get revenge for past wrongs...

I have a Holy Trinity of Filmmakers: Luis Buñuel, David Lynch, and Akira Kurosawa. The Bad Sleep Well is another masterpiece from a director who made many of them. This film proves, as do the likes of Drunken Angel and Stray Dog, that he was as brilliant at Japanese style-noir as he was at period dramas such as Rashomon and Yojimbo. I love a good revenge flick, and Nishi's attempt to bring down these powerful men, and learning why he's doing it, is fascinating to watch, so that even at 151 minutes the film moves briskly. Mifune once again proves himself one of Japan's best actors, and his fellow Kurosawa regulars Mori and Shimura are excellent as well. Nishi's relationship with Yoshiko, whom he originally marries as a mean to an ends but finds himself genuinely falling in love with, is heartbreaking, and Kyôko Kagawa (also in Ozu's Tokyo Story and Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff, among others) turns in a wonderfully sympathetic performance. Kamatari Fujiwara is also superb as a man willing to help Nishi, but guilt-ridden by his methods. The ending is tragic, and says a lot about how bureaucrats can abuse their power to crush those who stand in their way. Kurosawa is considered a legend for good reason, and this film ranks as one of his very best.