Review: Twenty-Four Eyes

Keisuke Kinoshita’s film is not unlike one character’s description of the island weather: “Not too hot, not too cold.”

Twenty-Four Eyes
Photo: Shochiku

Even without comparison to other 1954 Japanese releases (Sansho the Bailiff, The Seven Samurai, Late Chrysanthemums), Keisuke Kinoshita’s serpentine and sentimental Twenty-Four Eyes would still be pretty thin soup. The sprawling story begins in 1928 as plucky young teacher Hisako Oishi (Hideko Takamine) breezes into her new post at a rural Island Sea village, precipitating a bit of clucking among local biddies (“Riding a bicycle and wearing a suit. What’s the world coming to?”) but winning the love of the 12 first-graders (the 24 eyes of the title) in her class. The Goodbye, Mr. Chips-flavored predictability of the plot—in which distrustful parents learn to embrace the “modern woman,” the pupils pay the ailing teacher a lachrymose visit, and songs and excursions rule the day—is made more interesting by its historical background. As time passes and the country marches toward war, the children’s individuality is gradually smothered by militarist pomp and songs about lotus flowers and colored shells give way to hymns about favorite rifles and crushed enemies. Dismayed at the school’s adherence to governmental restrictions, Hisako resigns and focuses instead on raising a family, though she can’t let go of the students who have over the years become her surrogate children. Relentlessly wet-eyed, Twenty-Four Eyes mixes traces of trenchant wartime sorrow with dollops of saccharine nostalgia for schoolyard chorales; the resulting blend, alternately endearing and overbearing to modern eyes and ears, was reportedly a soothing experience to contemporary Japanese audiences for whom the fallout of the war was still a fresh and dolorous memory. Truly great melodrama is cathartic regardless of period context—Mahalia Jackson throbbing with “Trouble of the World” in Sirk’s Imitation of Life is unmistakably evocative of the Civil Rights movement, yet I’ve yet to meet a viewer who wasn’t shaken by the film’s waves of emotion. By contrast, Kinoshita’s film is not unlike the headmaster’s description of the island weather: “Not too hot, not too cold.”

Score: 
 Cast: Hideko Takamine, Hideki Goko, Yukio Watanabe, Makoto Miyagawa, Takero Terashita, Kunio Sato, Hiroko Ishii, Yasuko Koike, Setsuko Kusano, Kaoko Kase, Yumeji Tsukioka, Shizue Natsukawa, Toshiko Kobayashi, Kuniko Ikawa, Takahiro Tamura, Chishû Ryû  Director: Keisuke Kinoshita  Screenwriter: Keisuke Kinoshita  Running Time: 156 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1954  Buy: Video

Fernando F. Croce

Fernando F. Croce is a San Francisco-based film writer whose work has been published in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, MUBI, and Fandor. He runs the website CinePassion.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.