Takamine Hideko

[mccaskem at georgetown.edu]

I showed my students 24 Eyes a few weeks ago. We saw it as a follow-up to 
Kon's Millennium Actress, in which the main character is a composite, mainly of 
Takamine Hideko and Hara Setsuko.

The students were moved and surprised - they'd never seen a Japanese film like 
this before, and one wrote her term paper about it.

I mentioned in class that the irony was that Kon was gone in his forties, while 
the two actresses he referenced in Millennium Actress were still with us. But now 
Takamine is gone as well.

She wrote a 2-volume book of memoirs, which should be translated. She and 
Kurosawa had a sort of bittersweet romance back around 1940-41, when she 
starred in Uma, and Kurosawa was the first assistant director. I believe he first 
directed scenes on his own in this film, and worked directly with her quite a bit. 
She was very much younger than he, in her teens, and was a big star, while he 
was still just starting out in his career and past 30. So it couldn't and didn't 
amount to much in the end. She discusses it in her memoirs, written decades 
later.

Her earliest performance on US-playable DVD may be in Tokyo Chorus/Tokyo 
no Korasu, 1931, in the box set Silent Ozu. Two decades later she starred in 
Carmen Goes Back Home, post-WWII, which was I believe the first color film 
made in Japan, and is very entertaining. She was a truly great actress, and a 
notable writer in her later years as well.

Michael McCaskey
Georgetown Univ.