Gentlemen of Japan

The Bad Sleep Well. The bribe is a dominant fact of business life in Japan, and the fiscal scandal is a frequent feature of the public prints. To this situation Akira Kurosawa, a superb director with a burning concern for social problems (Ikirn), addresses himself in this angry, ironic, sometimes unfair but always violently exciting study of corruption in high places. His story is circumstantial, but his theme is universal: turn the rascals out! A scandal breaks. The subsidiaries of a construction trust are accused of rigging bids on government contracts. Secret kickbacks are suspected; elected officials may be involved. The press takes up the hue and cry, and the police grill two officials of the companies interested. They refuse to talk. Released, one of them commits suicide, and the other disappears and is presumed dead. But he is dangerously alive: a bomb in the hands of an almost insanely angry young man (Toshiro Mifune) who has sworn to avenge the murder of his father by the corporation. By a ruthless ruse--he has married the boss's daughter--the young man has placed himself inside the enemy's defenses. Can he get revenge before the corporation strikes? The suspense is terrific, but Kurosawa generates more than suspense. In his big boss (Masayuki Mori) he develops a masterly portrait of the power complex, and in scene after scene he examines with incinerating irony a way of life in which profits come first and people last. Occasionally the actors, trained to the grand grimace in the Japanese theatrical tradition, seem all set to twirl their mustachios and scream: "How now, me proud beauty!" But within his conventions Kurosawa is a realist, and when he does a caricature he does it in acid. The Bad Sleep Well is not quite so strong as his strongest pictures, but it has the vulgar energy, the cutting relevance, the mortal moral seriousness of first-rate journalism.

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