The Bad Sleep Well
(1960)
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The Bad Sleep Well is a 1960 film directed by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It was the first film to be produced under Kurosawa's own independent production company. It was entered into the 11th Berlin International Film Festival. The film stars Toshiro Mifune as a young man who gets a prominent position in a corrupt postwar Japanese company in order to expose the men responsible for his father's death. It has its roots in Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is also a critique of corporate corruption, with one of its recurring themes being the difficulty combating such corruption, due to a corporate culture in which lower level people feel obligated literally to die, rather than allow their superiors' activities to be discovered.