All of this blog is personal, but this particular post will be more personal than most thus far. Twenty-Four Eyes was one of the first Japanese movies I ever saw, though I think that if it had actually been the first I might never have watched another. In the mid-seventies, there was a series of Japanese films shown on the Los Angeles Public Television station that, in effect, introduced Japanese movies to American audiences outside of a few college film societies. It was introduced by an “authority” on Japan, so it was probably Edwin O. Reischauer. I have not been able to track down any further information from PBS/NET, so it was perhaps independently marketed. (If anyone else can remember the series and has information, please let me know.)
The movies in that series that seared themselves into my mind were Harakiri and Death By Hanging, even on a small b&w TV, but Twenty-Four Eyes seared itself into my ears instead. The host explained some background on the school teacher and the historical events around her, which was my first introduction to a Japanese viewpoint on the war. It also discussed how successful and important the film itself had been to the Japanese audiences when it appeared. What it did not prepare me for was a music score that consisted of songs like Annie Laurie, Home Sweet Home, Auld Lang Syne, The Last Rose of Summer and even What a Friend We Have in Jesus played almost endlessly, often while the school children were singing completely different songs at the same time. I finished the viewing far more confused than after any of the other films in the series and postponed a new viewing of the movie until just before I started the blog.
There are fashions in movie music, of course. Once Hollywood became comfortable with overdubbing in sound films, wall-to-wall music was the thing that distinguished Hollywood from all other movie cultures. By the mid-thirties, no one in the world ever had to wonder how they were supposed to feel about a scene in an American A feature, because there was always music to tell you precisely how you were supposed to feel, all told with a full symphony orchestra. That continues today in all “block-buster” movies, where the music is more constant than the CGI explosions. So it is no particular surprise that Japanese movies adopted similar practices once they gained some financial stability around 1950. We often have come across Japanese movies that simply repeat the same westernized orchestral music over and over throughout, and eventually you learn to ignore it unless it is a familiar tune that seriously distracts.
This is what happens with Twenty-Four Eyes. The problem is not that the music is incessant, which it most certainly is, but that it is familiar to American ears. Eventually I learned that many Euro/American songs had been adapted by the Japanese school authorities and had a completely different meaning for Japanese audiences, such as O Sole Mio sung by the schoolgirls in Tower of the Lilies to keep up their spirits. Nevertheless, this knowledge still could not erase their original sources from my ears.
An additional problem is that the music does not seem to be emotionally pointed. In classic American movie scoring, the music shifts and adjusts to reach emotional highpoints within the scene itself. This can be pretty literal, with orchestral crashes as the blows land or modulations upward as the characters climb the mountain or even Bernard Hermann’s famous shrieks each time the knife comes down on Janet Leigh. But it is always aimed forward, to keep the emotion growing or the energy flowing. Here there is no emotional progression. Once one of these songs wells up, it just keeps on until the chorus is finished. This has a lot to do with the 2½ hour length, as scenes play out longer than they should until the song finishes. American movie music is aimed toward the climax; here it seems to be aimed at the beginning of the emotion. It is rather like dropping the needle at random on an album of sing-along songs arranged for symphony orchestra. Thus, even on a new viewing I still found the music for Twenty-Four Eyes to be so distracting that I could hardly finish the movie, despite having Hideko Takamine to watch.
It is possible that for audiences younger than myself, this will not be a problem. I do not know if these songs are still taught in American elementary schools as they were when I was young. If they are not, then the music will not be so familiar and will be heard as just a sappy attempt to tug on the heartstrings in a movie that does not really need to have its heartstrings tugged. The destruction of the teacher’s hopes and family and the death, mutilation, and impoverishment of her twelve pupils through the years needs no extra juice in the telling.
Chuji Kinoshita was capable of better, and some of his scores in the late fifties and early sixties are startlingly original and imaginatively apt. So I have to assume the choice was made by his brother Keisuke, the director. And I certainly can accept that for Japanese audiences, the use of such school songs provided a profound emotional connection. But it is not a connection that I am capable of making.
There is a good movie behind the music, the story of thirties and forties Japan as seen from a tiny back-water village. It was a significant milestone for Japanese society’s attempt to come to grips with the recent past and is still regarded by Japanese critics as one of the nation’s true classics. But you may want to watch it as a silent movie, which the subtitles allow you to do, and imagine your own music when you think it is needed and only then.
