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The Bad Sleep Well



A young executive hunts down his father's killer in director Akira Kurosawa's scathing The Bad Sleep Well. Continuing his legendary collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa combines elements of Hamlet and American film noir to chilling effect in exposing the corrupt boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan.

Special Features

- New, restored high-definition digital transfer
- A 33-minute documentary on the making of The Bad Sleep Well, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series, Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create
- Original theatrical trailer
- New and improved subtitle translation
- New essays by film critic Chuck Stephens and director Michael Almereyda (Deadwood, Hamlet)

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Wasn't this film's soundtrack originally "Perspecta-Surround" or whatever that 3 channel mono process on Hidden Fortress is? If it was then it's a shame it hasn't been included here.

Running time 160min? To my knowledge it is 151min. Apparently Criterion's usual error.

Are you watching it in PAL or NTSC?... Remember PAL has 4% speedup on theatrical (& NTSC) running time

Mind you I'm finding it listed in the long version as 151 mins theatrical R/T in a range of resources, so the CC may well be in error...

What makes me now believe the theatrical is R/t ~151 is a bfi catalogue I have of the March 2002 Kurosawa Seasons, with a new set of prints struck. THE BAD SLEEP WELL is listed as 150 mins... Unless an even longer version has been uncovered since...

According to Donald Richie's "The films of Akira Kurosawa" the original version is 151minutes and the export version 135minutes. What ever that is worth

Gosh, some people take website typos awfully seriously.

I'm surprised this has no commentary track. Every Kurosawa release after Hidden Fortress features one. Maybe Criterion's bank account is shrinking. Harakiri definitely deserved a commentary as well, but all we got was a 10 minute Donald Ritchie Intro, which was more of a condensed commentary b/c he gives away the end of the film. Not so good for an intro.

analoguezombie wrote:I'm surprised this has no commentary track. Every Kurosawa release after Hidden Fortress features one. Maybe Criterion's bank account is shrinking. Harakiri definitely deserved a commentary as well, but all we got was a 10 minute Donald Ritchie Intro, which was more of a condensed commentary b/c he gives away the end of the film. Not so good for an intro.

I think it's probably a case of them focusing more on major releases (Ran, Ugetsu, Jules & Jim) and just getting these smaller releases out there. With Harakiri it seems to me a shameless ploy to make an extra buck (I surprise myself by accusing Criterion of this )by making it a double disc set and charging MSRP 39.99.
Kurosawa is well represented in the collection and most of the Kurosawa dvds are of the highest quality and packed with extras. I am more upset that Criterion deems Suzuki important enough to release six of his films (four this year alone) and yet not important enough to give him the special edition treatment.

I totally agree with you on the Harakiri release. There is no reason why it needed to be a 2-discer.

I have really enjoyed the commentary on past Kurosawa releases, and hoped the trend would continue. But, if there isn't too much Ritchie or Prince can say about it, that wouldn't be covered in a more modest interview, I'd rather it be cheaper than have an empty commentary track.

The lack of real extras on the Suzuki discs has puzzled me as well. I suppose Criterion doesn't feel a $40 suzuki would sell. The interviews on Youth of the Beast were nice, but I'd love a commentary by Tony Rayns or even Patrick Macais. I suppose though, the ebst candidate was Branded to Kill. Perhaps its a case of a lack of critical film analysis available. I have a collection of essays on Suzuki "Branded to Thrill: The Delirious cinema of Seijun Suzuki", and it encapsulates all the serious comment i have come across on his works. A real treasure would be a commentary with Seijun himself.

And while I'm on the topic, the lack of commentary of the recent HVe Fukusaku releases is frustrating too. I'll take what I can get, but the extras for those were very lacking. The Linda Hoaglung track on Under the Flag of the Rising Sun was very nearly worthless.

Since it seems The Bad Sleep Well will be a fairly barebones disc, what do you think the chances are of Criterion revisiting High and Low with a commentary in the near future? I was waiting to pick that one up, anticipating some kind of reissue.

I take it that this has been bumped further into January due to its order on the Criterion Website?

oldsheperd wrote:I take it that this has been bumped further into January due to its order on the Criterion Website?

Last week, Amazon bumped the shipping date on my order to Feb. 14th

This film is one of the great reworkings of Hamlet and one of the most haunting and anguished. It is beautifully lit and composed throughout. The creeping pace gives one time to reflect on the concept of responsibility and revenge, just like the immortal play itself, but also on modern day corporate corruption and immorality. It might actually be my favourite Kurosawa film. I can't wait to see it again in a gorgeous new transfer.

The BFI disc (DVD Beaver review here) has a 2.55:1 ratio, which is a bit weird for a 1960 Tohoscope film. 2.55 was the ratio for circa 1954-57 CinemaScope films with magnetic stereo release prints. Is the BFI cropped? A lot of Tohoscope transfers have noticeably deeper letterboxing than one would expect. If you look at those Beaver screenshots, the headroom looks a bit tight; otherwise, it looks great.

Back cover is up at Criteriondvd:


Here

Just saw the disc....a very good though not stunning transfer and a nice 30-minute section of "It Is Wonderful to Create" about the making of the film. Pretty barebones, for Criterion.
The booklet contains two essays: one by Chuck Stephens, and one by Michael Almereyda, I guess because he once made a bad modern-dress version of "Hamlet" and "The Bad Sleep Well" contains plot elements of Shakespeare's play.

Question: why do we need a minor director like Almereyda to tell us how great Kurosawa is?

I actually just watched it for the first time through my XBox 360 to an HD screen. Mind you that this the first DVD I have watched this way and the tranfer blew me away. It was better than very good. Safe to say that it is as good as it will be in our lifetime, providing I live 20 more years!
What a great film. Everytime I watch it it gets better.
For those of you wondering, the movie is 2 hours 30 minutes 39 seconds long.
It's great to see Kurosawa smoking at the beginning of the "Wonderful to Create" segment. He could have had a great cameo on a Suzuki film! Besides that it is bare bones but cannot complain about finally having this on DVD. Agree with the Almereyda essay. Maybe they were short on content.

The DVD Savant & BFI vs. Criterion

As I suspected, the BFI is heavily cropped. It is truly confounding as to why some Criterion transfers are cropped and some are not.
Fine transfer of an often overlooked masterpiece. Kudos.

I agree... the trasfer was incredibly crisp. I was additionally impressed by the new subtitle translation.

The only other version of this film that I've seen I had rented from Netflix about 8 months ago (I'm sorry, I don't remember the name of the company that produced the disc). The transfer on that disc was terrible, and whoever translated the subtitles didn't understand how to use English pronouns. Regardless of both of those issues, I could still tell the film was good. Watching it with a crisp new transfer and new subtitles, I thought it was wonderful. Thanks Criterion! Yet another subperb Kurosawa disc.

bjeggert82 wrote:The only other version of this film that I've seen I had rented from Netflix about 8 months ago

This would have been the old Mei Ah DVD version. The Kurosawa DVDs were some of their earliest DVD efforts -- and were pretty bad in terms of both subtitling and transfer quality. Happily, their recent releases are far better (alas no AK re-issues though) .

Caught this on TCM recently (been sitting in the DVR for a while). The more Toshirô Mifune movies I see the more I'm impressed by the guy's range. Here Mifune plays the Clark Kent version of his usually brash and outspoken angry characters. The tension and depth of rage simmering just below Nishi's glass-wearing polite surface are palpable though. His actions and the reasons he takes for doing them carry the movie for what would otherwise be 150 agonizingly long minutes. I knew nothing about the movie's story/twists before watching it. By the end I said 'WOW' several times. Kurosawa's trademark pre-70's bleak-view-of-humanity-with-a-ray-of-hope premise (corporate cover-ups and the toll Japan's modernization takes on family love/trust) is shown here at it's most biting, ferocious and intense. Kurosawa was Kubrick before the latter's movies became 'Kubriesque,' IMO. Despite some extreme overacting (Kamatari Fujiwara's Wada being the primary offender) and a slew of impossible coincidences "The Bad Sleep Well" is yet another successful collaboration from one of the most potent actor-director team-ups in history.

I thought Fujiwara's performance here was wonderful.

I got a kick out of seeing Takashi Shimura as Moriyama, essentially the same lovable old lug from "Ikiru" but here playing a stubbornly corrupt administrative officer that will not break down to Nishi's food-torturing techniques. Every time he was on-screen I was besides myself with glee.

Kamatari Fujiwara's one of my favorite actors of all time... he's the kind of actor most young cineastes don't pay much attention to but in reality he (and his ilk, like Bokuzen Hidari) is the glue that holds the fabric of so many of Kurosawa's films together, against which stars like Shimura and Mifune played. AK owed him a huge debt for the excellence of his work, and spoke openly about that fact.

And before Fujiwara was a mainstay in Kurosawa, he was a regular part of the ensemble (and sometimes star) in Naruse's early PCL/Toho films.

Every Frame A Painting on the geometry of a scene, using The Bad Sleep Well as an example.