The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
(Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru, Akira Kurosawa, Japan 1960, 151 min., 35mm, Japanese w/English subtitles)
The Bad Sleep Well tells the story of a corporation thrown into chaos when an unknown employee begins to dredge up its ugly secrets. Toshiro Mifune plays the cunning saboteur whose quest for justice in the guise of vengeance comes perilously close to turning him into the very thing he hopes to destroy. Kurosawa draws as much from American film noir as he does from Shakespeare's Hamlet to highlight the moral ambiguities of the story. Shot in TohoScope, the system was designed by the Japanese Toho studio to compete with Cinemascope, which it was nearly identical to. An early adopter of the format, Kurosawa used the system throughout the 1960s.