Akira Kurosawa was one of the most prolific directors to have emerged from Japan in the 20th century, leaving behind a legacy few other filmmakers have ever come close to achieving. Having already adapted William Shakespeare in 1957 with his version of MacBeth, Throne of Blood, in 1960 he turned his attention to Hamlet. The Bad Sleep Well takes the famous Shakespeare play and relocates it to contemporary Japan, a world of corporate greed and corruption in which double dealings, fraud and murder define the ethics of the business world. Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune stars as Koichi Nishi, a man who's father's apparent suicide was covered up by the corporation he worked for. Using a new identity, he ingratiates himself into the upper echelons of the corporation and exactly a slow-burning revenge. Beautifully shot in black and white, Kurosawa plays loose with the source material and offers up a stirring commentary on corruption and greed in society, drawing the conclusion that, in the absence of a legal system capable of rooting out such corruption, only personal revenge remains.
