Introduction to upcoming screening of The Bad Sleep Well

For anyone in the New York City area this week, I will be introducing, for a group I belong to, a screening of Kurosawa’s anti-corporate thriller The Bad Sleep Well (1960).

The screening will take place this Friday, October 25th, at 6:30 PM (ET) at The People’s Forum, which is at 320 West 37th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues in Manhattan.

I will give an intro to the film of approximately five minutes, with a ten-to-twenty-minute Q&A after the screening. As it’s a rather long movie (about 2.5 hours), the total time for the event will be approximately 6:30 – 9:30 PM.

Everyone who can make the screening is welcome. There is a sliding scale based on ability to pay, with no one turned away for lack of funds.

To find out more, please click here.

Sounds great, dylanexpert! What information are you planning to introduce the film with, what aspect of it will you underline for viewers?

I’ll talk about:
a) Kurosawa’s radical (anti-fascist) youth
b) The political context in which the film was released (e.g., the US-Japan Security Treaty demonstrations)
c) Kurosawa’s role in the Golden Age of Japanese cinema
d) The extraordinary opening wedding reception screen and use of widescreen
e) Kurosawa’s deal with Toho to co-produce his films (Kurosawa Production).

The screening went very well. I not only was able to present my introduction, but in the Q&A period afterwards, I advanced my favorite theory: namely, that when the Masayuki Mori character (the movie’s villain) is talking on the phone to an unseen party, in the middle of the movie and at the very end, Kurosawa was suggesting that the character was speaking to the Prime Minister of Japan, implying that the corruption depicted by the film rose to the very highest levels of the Japanese government! Kurosawa in an interview remarked that he wished he could have revealed the identity of the person on the other end of the line, implying that someone (probably in the management of Toho, the co-producing studio) put heavy pressure on him not to.