The film's justly celebrated opening is a long wedding scene, but no ordinary one. For one thing, the bride is lame, barely able to make it down the aisle — a bad omen. The huge wedding cake arrives to gasps of horror: it's a replica of an office building, modeled on that of the corporation whose head is the father of the bride, but it has a single red flower sticking out of the seventh-floor window, a gruesome reference to an employee who jumped from there. As if that weren't enough, the bride's brother loudly declares to the groom, “If you mistreat her, I'll kill you!” It's no surprise, then, when the police arrive and start arresting members of the corporation on corruption charges.

The groom is Nishi (Toshiro Mifune), and he's behind the macabre wedding cake, only one of many steps in his plan to infiltrate and destroy the corporation that employed his father, who was forced to kill himself by jumping out that window. The film follows his methodical efforts, and portrays him as a kind of ironic model of the stereotyped super-efficient, quiet, devoted Japanese worker. His ostensible motive is personal revenge, but Kurosawa gives him a larger social purpose in attempting to disrupt the smooth functioning corporation that exists in a moral vacuum: “I wanted to punish men who prey on people unable to fight back!”

Like all Christlike crusaders, Nishi has a fatal flaw that makes him human, and thus compromises his mission: he's actually in love with his enemy's daughter. What's more, in spite of his ruthlessness, he can't go to the extremes of immorality that Kurosawa shows as the modus operandi of the corporation. While he's able in one case to turn a key member of the corporation into a walking ghost, he pauses before hurling one of his human targets out a window, unable to perform such violence. This hesitation — which Nishi shows he's aware of when he laments, “I don't hate enough” — proves his undoing.

The Bad Sleep Well was shot in glorious Tohoscope, and appears in a new letterboxed director's cut here for the first time. This pristine print gives the viewer the full impact of Kurosawa's achievement, particularly in the close-ups of the ghostly, haunted faces of the corporation workers who've been pulled violently into Nishi's scheme. Typical of the sumptuous images here is a smoky volcanic landscape where accountant Wada tries to kill himself. The camera elegantly surveys this teeming vortex, an unforgettable symbol not only of the utter destructiveness of the corporation but of the violent uncertainty and fatal potential of postwar Japanese society.