Event Details
By 1960, Kurosawa had been in the film industry for half his life, excelling with contemporary stories (gendai-geki) and period pieces (jidai-geki) alike for Toho Studios, Daiei Film, and Shochiku Co. For The Bad Sleep Well, the filmmaker founded Kurosawa Films, knowing that the daring stylistic choices and topical themes he wanted to explore would cause friction with the majors. A neo-noir inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set in the corporate boardrooms of postwar Tokyo, Kurosawa’s nineteenth feature again casts the singular Toshiro Mifune at the center of a twisted cover-up that uncovers the sticky topics of corruption, shame, and greed.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.
1960 | 151 min. | Japan | Black-and-White | Japanese with English subtitles | Not Rated | 35mm
DIRECTED BY: Akira Kurosawa
WRITTEN BY: Hideo Oguni, Eijirô Hisaita, Akira Kurosawa, Ryûkô Kikushima, Shinobu Hashimoto
WITH: Toshiro Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Kyoko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi