Twenty-Four Eyes

The quietly moving drama Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), written and directed by Keisuke Kinoshita, is both ambitious and modest. The ambition shows up in its time span, stretching from the late 1920s to a little before its 1954 release, and its evocation of nuanced psychological responses to shifting historical circumstances. The modesty stems from its concentration on a small number of characters in a humble village, and also from the unforced poetry of Kinoshita's lyrical yet earthbound visual style. He delivered the "woman's picture" that the Shochiku studio ordered, but he used it to express a deeply personal vision. The protagonist is Hisako Oishi, a young teacher assigned to an elementary school on the Inland Sea island of Shodoshima, which is populated by farmers, fishers, and other hard-working folks. The locals are suspicious when she first arrives, wondering why she rides a bike instead of walking and wears a dress instead of a kimono. The children love her, though, and when she speaks with her mother at home we learn that she isn't showing off modern ways - she simply lives too far from school to walk, and her bike is hard to ride in traditional clothes. The parents eventually figure this out too, and life continues smoothly. Until it doesn't, and this is when Twenty-Four Eyes gets really interesting. Arriving at school one day, Hisako finds the principal in a tizzy over a teacher who's been arrested for giving communist essays to his pupils. When she hears the title of the offending book, Hisako responds that it's a very good book, the essays aren't subversive, and she's used it successfully in her own classes. The principal's tizzy intensifies, and he burns the forbidden pages while begging her not to say such dangerous things. Even in a rural elementary school, it turns out, you can't get away from politics. The flap over the essay book bothers Hisako, but she adjusts to the situation and goes on nurturing her pupils, pretty much untouched by the Great Depression and other events in the larger world. Things change when World War II brings a flood of military cheerleading and a swelling call for young men to fight and die for their country. Politics aside, Hisako is appalled at the waste of young lives on the battlefield - according to Japanese film scholar Audie Bock, the draft age in Japan fell as low as fourteen as the war proceeded - and decides to quit teaching rather than see her beloved students return to the island in the 1940s equivalent of body bags. She stays out of the profession for years, coming back only when the war is over and she knows her services are truly needed. The title of Twenty-Four Eyes refers to the bright, curious eyes of Hisako's first twelve pupils, and the story focuses almost entirely on her relationships at school, sometimes dropping in on students' families as well. We see little of her at home except in occasional domestic scenes. She converses at times with her mother, who seems to be a traditional yet open-minded woman, and she candidly discusses sensitive issues with her children, standing up for her antiwar stance even when her son starts thinking she may be a coward. Kinoshita's reticence about Hisako's domestic life has the beneficial effect of staving off sentimentality in potentially melodramatic scenes. We've caught only brief glimpses of her husband, whose job on a tourist boat keeps him largely away from home, so it's hard to mourn very much when he is killed in combat; the same goes when her daughter dies after a fall while climbing a tree. Although it's rich in strong feelings and contains a few tear-jerking episodes, the picture rarely becomes the out-and-out weepie it might have been in the hands of a less judicious director. Kinoshita's sparing use of close-ups is of particular note in a movie that a pushy camera could easily have turned into a three-handkerchief soap opera. The story's antiwar spirit and skepticism toward anticommunist paranoia came straight from Kinoshita's heart. He had resisted flag-waving militarism in earlier war-related movies, and adapting the 1952 novel Twenty-Four Eyes, written by Shodoshima native Sakae Tsuboi, gave him the opportunity to express his humanistic philosophy in terms that audiences of all kinds could find accessible and appealing. Kinoshita doesn't strike the ideal balance between formal rigor and emotional power that his contemporary Yasujiro Ozu found in towering works like Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), but in the film's best moments he comes close. A great deal of credit goes to the cast, headed by the marvelous Hideko Takamine, whose twenty-five years of experience enabled her to portray Hisako in various stages of life - as a neophyte teacher, a mature parent and educator, and a mellow veteran of her profession - with equal skill, conviction, and charm. Ozu admirers will also enjoy spotting his favorite actor, Chishu Ryu, as a less gifted teacher who fills in for Hisako - or tries to, with lackluster results - when an injury, possibly caused by a pupil's prank, sidelines her from the classroom for a while. Additional kudos go to the unaffected cinematography by Hiroshi Kusuda and the lovely score by the director's brother, Chuji Kinoshita, which is supplemented now and then by Western songs - "Home Sweet Home," "Auld Lang Syne" - that were thoroughly familiar to Japanese listeners in the years following the Allied occupation of their country. Kinoshita was highly productive, directing some fifty features, writing almost as many screenplays, and serving as a mentor at Shochiku for Masaki Kobayashi, who injected his own pacifist views into amazing movies like The Thick-Walled Room (1956) and the nine-and-a-half-hour epic The Human Condition (1959-1961). Kinoshita isn't as famous in the West as Ozu or Akira Kurosawa or Kenji Mizoguchi, but he was equally meticulous, taking almost four months to shoot Twenty-Four Eyes on location so the sights, sounds, and moods of Shodoshima would emerge as key players in the film. The effect is very different from the muted gorgeousness of The River, the 1951 film by Jean Renoir that Kinoshita credited with inspiring him, and it's even farther away from the gorgeous artifice of Ballad of Narayama (1958), which Kinoshita made just four years later. But it's no less brilliant. Twenty-Four Eyes is a human and humane drama that instantly won over Japanese moviegoers, was crowned best picture of the year by Kinema Junpo magazine, and earned a Golden Globe as well. It remains an international classic half a century after its premiere. Director: Keisuke Kinoshita Producer: Ryotaro Kuwata Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita Cinematographer: Hiroshi Kusuda Film Editing: Yoshi Sugiwara Art Direction: Kimihiko Nakamura Music: Chuji Kinoshita With: Hideko Takamine (Hisako Oishi), Shizue Natsukawa (Hisako's mother), Chishu Ryu (older teacher), Hideyo Amamoto (Hisako's husband), Ushio Akashi (principal). BW-156m. by David Sterritt

Japanese classics encompass more than Samurai films, Kurosawa epics and family dramas from Yasujiro Ozu. One of the most popular home-grown Japanese films ever is 1954's Twenty-Four Eyes, a moving story about twenty years in the life of a grade school teacher on a rural fishing island. Instantly recognizable as an Eastern variation on the "women's weepie" subgenre typified by American films like Stella Dallas, director Keisuke Kinoshita's beautifully composed film focuses on the emotional trials of its leading character as she suffers through both an economic depression and a war. Surprisingly enough, we learn from the disc extras that the pacifist-themed Twenty-Four Eyes had to wait for the end of the American Occupation to go into production. Synopsis: Shodoshima islanders are surprised when the young and energetic Hisako Oishi (Hideko Takamine) is assigned to teach their children instead of the usual retirement age burnout. Hisako's twelve first-graders fall in love with the new teacher who brightens their day with songs and encourages them to seek out better futures for themselves. Hisako is initially distrusted by the community for wearing Western clothing and riding an un-ladylike bicycle, but wins approval in a number of heartfelt episodes. An injury forces her to teach closer to home, and she doesn't teach her original twelve again for several years. She marries a tour boat captain and has children of her own. In the hard economic times, several girls must drop out of school to work at home. One disappears when her family breaks up. Hisako is further disillusioned when most of "her boys" prepare to become soldiers. One of her girls must work as a waitress in a distant town, while another succumbs to tuberculosis. Hisako loses one of her own children to an accident as well. The last straw comes when the school principal discovers that Hisako has been teaching with a book of children's writings declared "Communist" by the military government. She stops teaching and cares for her children while her husband goes into the Navy. The future does not look good. The episodic, openly sentimental Twenty-Four Eyes wins us in the very first scene when Hisako meets the adorable children that will figure in her life for the next two decades. She does everything right but history thwarts her mission to better their lives. The poverty and politics of the Depression years take a terrible toll, just as happened here in the United States. The movie focuses almost exclusively on Hisako's personal experience and that of her innocent students. Her beloved husband makes only brief appearances as a bridegroom, a boat captain, and when waiting to be called up to serve. We judge Hisako's character almost exclusively by her exterior graces. Clearly the very model of an ideal Japanese woman, she's bright and charming at work, and responds to every crisis with grace and dignity. Painfully injured in a fall, Hisako politely asks the children to summon aid (children do a lot of running in this movie). When her entire class walks ten miles to see her and arrives tired and hungry, she feeds them despite the fact that she's on crutches. An idyllic early scene shows Hisako and her brood dancing and singing in a grove of flowering trees. With the onset of the depression, parents withdraw their children to work at home. Heartbroken, Hisako must put up a front of neutrality when her students seem desperate to stay in school. She watches helplessly as the promise of the future is dismantled student by student. Hisako sheds plenty of tears both privately and with others; director Kinoshita's emotional clarity pretty much guarantees that viewers will mist up as well. Interestingly, the director uses sentimental Western tunes for key transitions: Auld Lang Syne; the hymn What a Friend We Have in Jesus. Keisuke Kinoshita reportedly ran into trouble during the war by filming scenes counter to guidelines laid down by Japan's military government. Twenty-Four Eyes is a full-on criticism of the war years. Literally every service-age male goes off to war accompanied by songs urging a happy death for the honor of the Emperor, and few return. Hisako witnesses the destruction of a generation and her personal happiness to events out of her control. The scenes after the war are bittersweet in the extreme. Hisako is invited to a small celebration by a few of her old students, almost all of them women. Twenty-Four Eyes' closest contemporary American counterpart is the 1955 soaper Good Morning, Miss Dove, a rather forced weepie with Jennifer Jones remembering a lifetime of teaching from her sickbed. Kinoshita's movie never becomes maudlin, despite the fact that almost every scene in its second half is visited by some sort of tragedy. Despite the sadness, the general mood is one of uplift. The director invests his many exteriors with the feeling that all hardship will eventually pass. Viewers unaware of the social realities of earlier times may become irritated that Hisako doesn't assert herself more; just riding a bicycle makes her suspicious in the eyes of many. She quietly accepts the principal's hysterical burning of her "Red" pamphlet during the anti-Communist scare. We're told that Japanese educators were terrorized by mass firings and bullied into silence on political subjects. This content from the original Sakae Tsuboi novel is probably what kept Twenty-Four Eyes from being produced earlier, when Americans oversaw Japanese film production. In the early 1950s, the exact same witch hunt fever was at large in the United States. The youthful-looking Hideko Takamine ages twenty years as the adorable teacher Hisako; we'd never believe that Twenty-Four Eyes was her 130th film appearance. Revered actor Chishu Ryu plays a decent but unimaginative teaching colleague. This sentimental saga won many Japanese awards. In America it won a Best Foreign Film Golden Globe, even when cut by 38 minutes. It was remade in color in 1987. Criterion's DVD of Shochiku's Twenty-Four Eyes is a good B&W transfer that only occasionally shows signs of fluctuating density. Otherwise it's clean and sharp, with a solid soundtrack. Director Keisuke Kinoshita passed away in 1998, so critic Tadao Sato hosts the fascinating featurette on the making of the film. In many cases, we're told, the actors playing students were cast with look-alike brother - sister pairs, to maintain continuity as the children aged on screen. The teasers and trailers provided are formatted in Wide Screen and appear to be from a later reissue. Disc producer Curtis Tsui provides an insert booklet with an essay by Audie Bock and a 1955 text interview with director Kinoshita. For more information about Twenty-Four Eyes, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Twenty-Four Eyes, go to TCM Shopping. by Glenn Erickson