Takamine Hideko
Hakodate-born Takamine Hideko (born Hirayama Hideko; 1924-2010) had a film career that spanned five decades. She was one of the most popular Japanese film stars, along with her contemporaries Tanaka Kinuyo and Hara Setsuko. While Tanaka was especially associated with director Mizoguchi and Hara with Ozu, Takamine Hideko is most associated with Mikio Naruse, who cast her in seventeen films.
[Takamine Hideko]
Takamine first appeared in front of the camera at the age of five, thanks to her aunt, who was the wife of a benshi, and who raised her after the early death of her mother. The film's success led to a long-term engagement, and over the next few years Takamine Hideko appeared in over a hundred films, becoming the most popular child actress - the Japanese equivalent of Shirley Temple (most of these early films have been lost).
After leaving school in 1937, she was signed up by the Toho film studio. Her collaboration with director Yamamoto Kajiro brought her first critical successes: both her role as a poor girl fighting for a better life in Tsuzurikata kyoshitsu and her portrayal of a farmer's daughter who lovingly raises a horse and eventually has to sell it to the army in Uma (Horse) earned her praise. Her popularity with the public is also reflected in the comedy Hideko no shasho-san (Hideko, the Bus Conductor), which bears her name in its title. This was her first collaboration with Naruse.
During World War II she was a pin-up girl for Japanese soldiers and performed as a singer in nightclubs. A strike at Toho caused her to leave the studio in 1946 and sign with Shintoho. In 1949 she sang the theme song for the movie Tokyo Folies, which sold several hundred thousand copies. In 1950, she played the youngest of the four Makioka sisters in Yutaka Abe's Sasameyuki, based on Tanizaki's novel of the same name; through this, she met Tanizaki and his wife and remained a friend of the couple until the author's death.
In 1950 she also starred with Tanaka Kinuyo in Ozu's The Munekata Sisters, but for various reasons this was not a typical Ozu film - I also don't like the role she has to play, where she sometimes has to speak with a fat voice like "the infamous North Korean news reader." Ozu's usual stylistic quirks, like the repetition of dialog fragments, simply don't work here, but become one of the elements that make the whole movie look strangely artificial.
Takamine's tenure with Shintoho ended in 1950. From then on, she was no longer tied to a studio, but pursued acting as a freelancer. The following twenty years represent the most artistically significant phase of her career. Among the films she made during this period, those with Naruse and Kinoshita stand out.
Among the important works she made with Kinoshita were the first Japanese color film Carmen Returns Home, in which she demonstrated her comedic talent as a stripper, its sequel Carmen's Pure Love, and the anti-militarist drama Twenty-Four Eyes, in which she plays a dedicated teacher who follows the lives of her twelve students from the early Showa period to the postwar era. She also starred in Immortal Love (1961), in which she played the lead role of a raped woman who marries her assailant in order to take revenge despite her boyfriend's objections. Finally, we should mention The River Fuefuki (1960), a period film that presents a pessimistic version of the samurai myth. Takamine appeared in a total of 9 films by Kinoshita.
After leaving school in 1937, she was signed up by the Toho film studio. Her collaboration with director Yamamoto Kajiro brought her first critical successes: both her role as a poor girl fighting for a better life in Tsuzurikata kyoshitsu and her portrayal of a farmer's daughter who lovingly raises a horse and eventually has to sell it to the army in Uma (Horse) earned her praise. Her popularity with the public is also reflected in the comedy Hideko no shasho-san (Hideko, the Bus Conductor), which bears her name in its title. This was her first collaboration with Naruse.
During World War II she was a pin-up girl for Japanese soldiers and performed as a singer in nightclubs. A strike at Toho caused her to leave the studio in 1946 and sign with Shintoho. In 1949 she sang the theme song for the movie Tokyo Folies, which sold several hundred thousand copies. In 1950, she played the youngest of the four Makioka sisters in Yutaka Abe's Sasameyuki, based on Tanizaki's novel of the same name; through this, she met Tanizaki and his wife and remained a friend of the couple until the author's death.
In 1950 she also starred with Tanaka Kinuyo in Ozu's The Munekata Sisters, but for various reasons this was not a typical Ozu film - I also don't like the role she has to play, where she sometimes has to speak with a fat voice like "the infamous North Korean news reader." Ozu's usual stylistic quirks, like the repetition of dialog fragments, simply don't work here, but become one of the elements that make the whole movie look strangely artificial.
Takamine's tenure with Shintoho ended in 1950. From then on, she was no longer tied to a studio, but pursued acting as a freelancer. The following twenty years represent the most artistically significant phase of her career. Among the films she made during this period, those with Naruse and Kinoshita stand out.
Among the important works she made with Kinoshita were the first Japanese color film Carmen Returns Home, in which she demonstrated her comedic talent as a stripper, its sequel Carmen's Pure Love, and the anti-militarist drama Twenty-Four Eyes, in which she plays a dedicated teacher who follows the lives of her twelve students from the early Showa period to the postwar era. She also starred in Immortal Love (1961), in which she played the lead role of a raped woman who marries her assailant in order to take revenge despite her boyfriend's objections. Finally, we should mention The River Fuefuki (1960), a period film that presents a pessimistic version of the samurai myth. Takamine appeared in a total of 9 films by Kinoshita.
She appeared in seventeen films for Naruse Mikio, mostly portraying the type of strong-willed, hard-working woman who finds herself at the bottom of society or is subjugated by the family system. The first of these was Lightning (1952), in which she plays one of the daughters of a poor, pathetic mother who has four children, three daughters and a son, by four different men - not surprisingly, it is a movie full of tensions, though like in Ozu they remain under the surface. In this early film, Naruse is still learning how to use Takamine's remarkable skills, just as she is learning how to play complex adults, but there are already many signs of the greatness to come.
That greatness was achieved in Drifting Clouds (1955), which was showered with awards, including the Kinema Junpo Award for Best Actress (Takamine), Best Actor (Mori Masayuki), Best Director (Naruse), and Best Picture! Takamine Hideko plays a sensitive woman in the turmoil of post-war Japan who clings hopelessly to a married, unfaithful man she met during the war in Indochina and destroys herself in the process. She is humiliated by the way the men in her life who treat her solely as a sexual object. In his journals, Ozu called this movie "a true masterpiece."
Another of Takamine's greatest films with Naruse followed in 1960, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, which chronicles a period in the life of a Tokyo bar hostess who ekes out a living and dreams of opening her own business despite the constant challenges of money and men. The film is an exquisite character study of a woman caught in the trap of financial obligations, forced to take a job she dislikes in order to stay afloat. It is both a portrait of one woman's courage and perseverance and a commentary on the limited opportunities available to women with little education or family ties in Japan. Takamine Hideko is unforgettable as the beleaguered hostess.
In 1961, Takamine starred in Naruse's As a Wife, As a Woman, a film about Miho, the mistress of married professor Keijiro, who has been managing the Ginza bar owned by him and his wife Ayako for years, hoping that one day she will be made the owner in recognition of her efforts. When the bar is mortgaged for a new acquisition and taken away from her, she decides to fight for custody of Keijiro's children, Hiroko and Susumu, who are her biological children and were raised as their own by Keijiro and the infertile Ayako. When the children learn that Miho, who had always been introduced to them as their aunt, is their real mother, the daughter leaves the family and the Ayako finally asks for a divorce. However, Miho only gets a paltry sum as compensation, so she decides to open a street food stand. Takamine is once again great in the role of the suffering lover who has always remained faithful. But of course the wife, Ayako, was just as much a victim of her husband.
Takamine Hideko also played in the 1962 film A Wanderer's Notebook, about the life of Hayashi Fumiko, of whose novels she had made three other adaptations with Naruse. The film was not so much based on the autobiographical novel of the same title by writer Hayashi Fumiko as on its stage adaptation. It is a conventional rags to riches narrative, although Takamine gives a stellar performance as usual.
Of course, Takamine also worked with directors other than Naruse and Kinoshita. In
1958, she appeared in Rickshaw Man, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki, a remake of the director's own 1943 film. Set in Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it tells the story of Matsugoro, a rickshaw-puller played by Mifune Toshiro, who becomes a surrogate father to the child of a recently widowed woman played by Takamine Hideko. The film won the Golden Lion at the 1958 Venice Film Festival.
Takamine also appeared in 2 films by Toyoda Shiro, a director known for his tasteful literary adaptations. The most notable of these is The Wild Geese (1953), based on the novel by Ogai Mori, in which she plays the lead role of Otama, a young woman who becomes the mistress of a married man in order to support her aging father. She falls in love with a student who saves her caged bird from a snake, but nothing comes of it as he soon has to leave for Germany to study.
And with Masumura Yasuzo she starred in The Doctor's Wife (1967), based on the novel of the same name by Ariyoshi Sawako, about the first doctor in the world to operate on a patient under general anesthesia in 1804 (played by Ichikawa Raizo), using techniques derived from both Dutch and Chinese medicine. The main characters are the doctor's mother (Takamine Hideko) and his wife (Wakao Ayako), who are in fierce competition with each other to help with the experiment to test the powder to be used as an anesthetic.
In 1955 Takamine married Kinoshita's assistant director Matsuyama Zenzo, who later became a director and screenwriter. Contrary to convention, she did not retire to family life, but continued to work as an actress. According to her own statements, she wanted to create a new type of working woman. Takamine's husband also made some movies with her in the following period, such as Burabura Monogatari, a comedy in which Takamine played a confidence trickster.
From the 1950s Takamine also appeared as a writer. She wrote essays and travel books. In 1976 she published her two-part autobiography Watashi no Tosei Nikki ("My Professional Diary").
As the above shows, Takamine's roles were extremely varied, to the point where it's hard to believe that one and the same woman played so many roles, and each time with remarkable success. She is one of the few actresses in the history of Japanese cinema who seems to have never stopped transforming herself for her roles, and who was able to truly capture the essence of each of her many characters.
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[The Wild Geese (1953)]
1. Horse, with Yamamoto Kajiro & Kurosawa Akira (1941)
Filmed over the course of 3 years in the Tohoku region (specifically Iwate, Japan's horse-breeding prefecture), this film is a beautifully poetic depiction of rural life. The unsentimental story concerns Ine (Takamine Hideko), the eldest daughter of a Japanese peasant family living on the edge of poverty, who persuades her parents to let her take care of a pregnant horse from another farmer during the winter in exchange for keeping the foal. Ine raises the colt from birth and grows to love the horse. As Kurosawa wrote in his Something Like an Autobiography, and as Takamine also stated, Kurosawa was the assistant director, but since Yamamoto had other movies to shoot in Tokyo, he was left in Tohoku to shoot all the scenes there, and he was also in charge of editing the movie, so it is not too much to say that this was actually his directing debut. Teenager Takamine Hideko plays a stubborn "otenba" character, but also gives a very sensitive performance. When the horse gets sick, she walks miles through the snow to a hot spring where grass grows all year round to save the horse's life. But when the colt grows up, unpaid bills force the family to sell him at auction. The film was made at a time when the Japanese military was in power, but it is remarkably unconcerned with the political situation - one could say that the only concession it makes to Japan's war effort is that Ine's colt is eventually sold to the army.
2. Hideko the Bus Conductor, with Naruse Mikio (1941)
Hideko works as a conductor for a small bus company in the countryside (Yamanashi), where the number of passengers is dwindling. To help the company survive, she asks a visiting writer to write commentaries on local sights, which she recites to the passengers as they travel through the countryside. It is a pity that the company owner has other ideas... Not only a wonderfully peaceful and pleasant movie made during the war years, but also a remarkable story about a young woman coming out as a professional. And, as in some 1930s movies like Arigato-san, great location shots through the windows of the bus. Based on a short story by Ibuse Masuji. This was the first movie Naruse made with Takamine, with sixteen more to follow between 1945 and 1966.
3. Carmen Comes Home, with Kinoshita Keisuke (1951)
4. Lightning (Inazuma) with Naruse Mikio (1952)
5. Twenty-Four Eyes, with Kinoshita Keisuke (1954)
6. Floating Clouds, with Naruse Mikio (1955)
Naruse and Takamine's most popular movie, but also a rather melodramatic one. Set in a devastated post-war Tokyo and a society in disarray, it shows the tenacity of an unhappy woman (Takamine Hideko) in love with a worthless married man (Mori Masayuki) she met in Southeast Asia during the war. She endures all kinds of humiliation at his hands - even when he takes up with another mistress, or simply leaves her behind without saying anything when he is transferred to a new job. It is an utter mystery what she sees in him. To survive, she has to turn to prostitution - at all stages of her life, she is manipulated by men. She follows her lover all the way to the remote island of Yakushima (the edge of postwar Japan), where she finally dies. In the chilling final scene, he carefully applies lipstick to her dead lips. Based on the novel by Hayashi Fumiko. Kinema Junpo Award for best film of the year.
7. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, with Naruse Mikio (1960)
Set in the Ginza bar world. Takamine Hideko plays a strong and dignified widow who runs a bar and encounters nothing but exploitation by men and her greedy family. She struggles to maintain her independence in a male-dominated society and every evening again ascends the stairs to her second floor bar, trying hard to put on a happy face for the customers. Shows the impossibility of escape. A most beautiful film, in which Takamine Hideko gives an magnificent performance - with great depth, nuance and delicacy - as a woman much superior to her surroundings. Has Nakadai Tatsuya as a comical bar tender.
8. Immortal Love, with Kinoshita Keisuke (1961)
The son of a landowner (Nakadai Tatsuya) returns from the war a semi-cripple and falls in love with the daughter of a tenant-farmer (Takamine Hideko). He lies that her fiance has died in the war and forces himself on her. Pregnant, she has no choice but to marry him. But then her fiance returns. The marriage based on a lie becomes hell for both partners and their children. So this is not a love story! Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
9. Yearning, with Naruse Mikio (1964)
In the early 1960s in the town of Shimizu, Reiko runs a small grocery store on behalf of her mother-in-law, which she has built up through hard work. She lost her husband in the war shortly after their marriage and must also support her young brother-in-law Koji (Kayama Yuzo), who leads a dissolute life. Her two married sisters-in-law urge Reiko to remarry while she's still young. The arrival of a low-price supermarket in the neighborhood threatens all the small shops. This leads to a family dispute about the future of the shop, while at the same time Koji makes Reiko uncomfortable by confessing his love for her. Finally, Reiko flees to an onsen in the countrysife, but Koji stalks her. Reiko turns him down again at a hotel stop, and Koji wanders off. In the early hours of the morning, his lifeless body is found. The last shot is of Reiko's blank face as she realizes what happened. Silver Sail Award for Best Actress at the 1964 Locarno International Film Festival. Takamine gives another of her complex, almost silent performances in which she seems to reveal intense and complicated emotions through her eyes alone.