Reviews

As a female director in 1950s Japan, Kinuyo Tanaka was quite a rarity, and some may find worth in seeing the film for that reason alone, or, conversely, worry that that is the *only* reason it receives any approbation, but avoiding those two extremes and looking at the film objectively, it is well worth your time, especially if you are familiar with the works of directors (like Ozu and Naruse) of family- or women-oriented Japanese films of the 50s. If you assume from the broad plot outline - a woman suffers from breast cancer, while trying to raise two children and make ends meet and to pursue her interest in writing poetry, despite her unemployed (and philandering) husband - that you are in for a simplistic tearjerker, you will be surprised. The protagonist (Fumiko) is not a saint, and has complex relationships with each of the other major adult characters, including romantic desires for two very different men after divorcing her husband. Her battle with cancer is presented with some realism and jarring moments (a friend recoils in horror when she gets a glimpse of Fumiko's scars after a double mastectomy; an ominous corridor, down which cancer patients who have passed on are wheeled to the morgue, looms outside her room at the hospital). One might even call some moments Bergman-esque. Pacing and camera angles are expertly handled by director Tanaka, and cliches are for the most part avoided. A word about the title: "Eternal Breasts" is not a good English translation at all. "Eternal" does not modify "breasts" in the Japanese title. It's literally more like "Above and Beyond Breasts, The Getting Used to Permanence," or maybe "Becoming Accustomed to the Permanent Condition of Being More Than Breasts." I watched it on the Criterion Channel, which called it "Forever a Woman," which is not really a translation, but does make sense as a title in English.

This one has a good pace, and good cast, but it plays like they made it up as they went along. The big problem is that rather than focus on a single protagonist, or an ensemble cast's response to a single event, the plot moves from event to event with no point of view, or any point at all.

It starts at a private party at a mansion -- we're first introduced to a waiter at the party, who's being friend-zoned by a rich blonde girl (he's also the sheriff's son, for no good reason). Then we meet the host's son (Don Galloway from "Ironside"), who's estranged from the host but who the host has invited, and the son hopes for a reconciliation. He's brought along his wife. An older lady who seems like the host's wife is actually his secretary and specifically tells the son that it wasn't her idea to invite him.

The father/host runs a winery, and during the party invites the son down to the "tasting room," where he proceeds to the Airing of Grievances, the main two being that the son didn't care for the family business, like his late mother, and that he married a poor girl -- dad wanted him to marry the rich girl from the party scene, explaining it would unite two large winery properties. (The rich girl and the son were childhood playmates.) Son wants to borrow money because wife is pregnant. Dad is unsympathetic, but explains that there's a family tradition of fathers challenging the sons to a drinking contest, and son can win money ($5K I think) if he's the last man standing as they drink the winery's signature wine "The Joyful Woman." Waiter/ cop's kid has to stand there and pour for them.

Eventually, the son passes out and waiter dude has to help him upstairs. Just then, rich blonde and the secretary come down the stairs. Dad tells secretary he's not going to give the announcement at midnight. Secretary stalks off, furious. (At some later point in the proceedings she tells son's wife -- the wife's only purpose in the script -- that the announcement would be the engagement of secretary and Dad. Secretary in that later scene bitterly says she waited 20 years for his first wife to die. I didn't get why wine guy called it off.)

Dad, drunk, says he's still interested in uniting the properties, and asks the young woman to marry him. Young woman, fending off amorous dad, accidentally pushes him down the stairs. He hits his head, and young woman runs upstairs, panicked. She finds her toady, Waiter Boy, and says she thinks she's killed wine man, and asks him to help. Of course he says he'll go down to the tasting room and check it out. But secretary gets there first. Groggy wine guy is sitting on the stairs, asking for the license number of the truck that hit him. Secretary beats him over the head many times with, what else, a wine bottle. He's dead but good this time. Waiter comes down, sees the broken wine bottle and instantly realizes who killed wine dad. Secretary then takes waiter at gunpoint to some other part of the basement and shoots him. Shoots at him, I mean, because the gun doesn't fire. He laughs at his good fortune, but his triumph is short-lived because she promptly bops him over the head with the pistol, and he falls into some kind of vat thingy. She starts water flowing into it; the strong implication is that the knocked-out waiter will drown if not rescued in time.

Whew. Lots more plot to go. Waiter kid's dad the sheriff shows up. Rich blonde tells him she thinks wine guy is dead, which he soon confirms. Doctor says the wine guy died from 6 or 7 blows to the head. Blonde girl not arrested or even questioned -- instead dad seems more interested in finding the waiter, who is deemed missing. (Which is why I think the script needed that father-son connection -- to explain why the Sheriff doesn't just ignore waiter's absence and solve the murder instead.). Sheriff goes to talk to the secretary to find out what happened to waiter guy, but she's ODed on sleeping pills and incoherent. Eventually, wine son, Sheriff, and rich girl look for waiter kid. Rich girl realizes water that's pouring out of a pipe shouldn't be and leads them to the flooding vat thingy quicker than you can say Lassie. Sheriff revives soggy but alive waiter. Waiter and blonde laughingly repeat some earlier platonic banter.

Whose story is it? The wine family? The father/ son relationship ends quickly, and son is clearly not the focus in the second half. The rich blonde girl? She seems at first to be framed by circumstance for wine guy's murder (an Alfred Hitchcock TV show staple), but no one seems to put 2 & 2 together, or care, including her, so there's never a sense that she's being blamed for wine guy's death. Is the focus is the waiter guy's heroics? But there aren't any -- he gets buffaloed by a middle-aged woman and is the off-screen damsel in distress in the last half. At the end I was like, what the heck did I just watch, Hitch.

Excellent final episode for the anthology series, that echoes many of the themes and plot points of classic film noir from the 1940s, transferred to an English setting (Dorsetshire?) and a TV-level budget. The protagonist (Bradford Dillman -- his second Thriller; he's OK here, but not as good as he was as the blind pianist in "The Next Voice You See" from season 5) is trying to escape his dishonorable past, and a pursuing gangster, by hiding out in an out of the way place (like Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past), and by chance meets a beautiful and mysterious woman (Suzann Farmer, who is great (and great-looking) in the role). They hit it off, but she says she can't get involved because she's married to a wealthy 60 year old man, but of course they do get involved, even though he doesn't know her name (he calls her "Blondie"). She is soon revealed to be the classic noir femme fatale, ensnaring our not-too-bright hero in a plot to kill her husband to get his money and then run off together (see Double Indemnity). Things go well at first, but the plans gradually unravel in a delicious fashion. If it sounds like I'm saying the plot is derivative, it really doesn't come off that way, with some surprises when you think you have it figured out. The plot never strains credibility, the pace is quick, no dull moments, and there's more outdoors scenes than usual for Thriller (although continuing the show's practice, common in British TV in the 70s, of video for interiors and film for exteriors); also, as other reviewers have noted, Ms. Farmer spends most of the episode running around in a miniscule bikini, which will appeal to the male viewer, although the role is much more complex than serving as mere decoration.

Like a couple other in this next-to-last season, this plays like a script written generically for any show -- Stu Bailey stands around on the margins to show that it's really an episode of 77 Sunset Strip, but contributes nothing to the plot. Everything that happens in the story (woman holds hostage a real estate man's books and papers, then tries to start a relationship in Palm Springs with a wealthy young man, as realtor pursues) could have happened without the involvement of the agency of Bailey & Spencer. Not horrible; it moves at a fairly good pace and it's always nice to see Yvonne Craig, but overall a disappointment for failing to fit into the show's format.