The Bad Sleep Well

The Bad Sleep Well is a 1960 Akira Kurosawa film starring Toshiro Mifune. Both the director and this actor are favorites of mine, so I watch everything I come across involving either of them. They never let me down.

I watched it at Hulu. Hulu doesn't offer any free viewing now, so we're out of luck with them. Here's a trailer:

The New York Times' 1963 review said,

If all the future imports in this theater are as forceful and engrossing as this one from the director of a long list of Japanese champions, beginning with "Rashomon", local film fans are due for a lot of excitement and the popularity of the project should be assured.

"The Bad Sleep Well" is an aggressive and chilling drama of modern-day Japan, exposing a fringe of "big business" in the forthright manner of an American gangster film.

Kurosawa in Review concludes with this: Like so many of the Kurosawa films before it, The Bad Sleep Well is a call to action. Kurosawa lays it all out there for the audience to see. While at the time he was making a film that commented on the society that he lived in, the themes live on today.
Shakespeare would be proud." TCM has an article that quotes the director: "... A film made only to make money did not appeal to me one should not take advantage of an audience. Instead, I wanted to make a movie of some social significance."

Slant Magazine says, "Grim and astringent, Akira Kurosawa's searing condemnation of post-WWII corporate corruption takes direct aim at his prior work's humanistic hopefulness". DVD Talk closes with this: "Any serious student of Japanese cinema should rush out and see The Bad Sleep Well, one of the very best films from one of the art's great masters."

Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 100%.