Shaw Brothers

Diau Charn

When does Shaw Brothers begin? It would seem to be an easy question. According to the Hong Kong Film Archive, the first film released by the Shaw Brothers studio was probably The Magic Touch, released in December of 1958¹.

But to only look at the name preceding the film is to simplify a more complex question. The Shaw Brothers company didn’t just spring into existence fully-formed in 1958. The Shaw family had been making films in Hong Kong since 1952 under the name “Shaw and Sons”. And even that company was a new-comer in the Shaw family’s filmmaking history. Their first Hong Kong studio, Nanyang, was formed in 1933. Before Hong Kong, the Shaws made and distributed films in Shanghai.

The name above the titles is a largely arbitrary division, so we should look elsewhere to find the legendary ‘first’ Shaw Brothers film. Maybe we should look for the first film made by the man most identified with Shaw Brothers — Run Run Shaw.

Until 1957, Run Run Shaw mostly worked in Singapore, running the distribution side of the Shaw industry². But Shaw and Sons was facing increased competition from MP & GI, and Runde Shaw’s super-economical productions were paling in comparison to more stylish films. Run Run moved to Hong Kong, took over the running of Shaw and Sons, changed the name to Shaw Brothers and, for the next 25 years, produced the films that made Shaw Brothers an internationally-known name.

But determining exactly when Run Run’s influence supplanted Runde’s is a nearly impossible task. Run Run’s first producer credit is also the first film to be released under the Shaw Brothers name, The Magic Touch³. But Runde’s name continues to appear on film credits through 1959. And it’s hard to believe that in an industry that turns out movies in a matter of months that it took over a year for Run Run to get involved in the filmmaking process.

The official Shaw Story complicates this question by firmly attaching the ‘start’ of Shaw Brothers to 1959’s The Kingdom and the Beauty, even though it was released months after The Magic Touch.⁴

Maybe it’s less about the name or the producer, and more about the style that made the studio famous. The rich colors, the widescreen image, the attention paid to costumes and beauty. With that criteria in mind, The Kingdom and the Beauty comes to the top again. It wasn’t the first color film made by a Shaw studio⁵, it may not have been the first widescreen film⁶, and it wasn’t the first to present a mythically beautiful ‘historical’ China. But it’s the first to really combine all of the elements that made Shaw Brothers famous in the early 1960s.

But The Kingdom and the Beauty could never have been made if the studio hadn’t made Diau Charn the year before. Whether that makes Diau Charn the ‘first’ Shaw Brothers film a ‘proto-Shaw Brothers’ film makes little difference — Diau Charn is one of many links in the filmmaking chain between Shaw and Sons and Shaw Brothers.

Diau Charn was not the first haungmei opera film, but it was the first haungmei made by a Shaw studio. It’s unclear who approved the idea, Run Run or Runde Shaw⁷. Since a previous haungmei film had done well at the box office⁸, it seems likely that either producer would have approved of the idea.

Diau Charn shows the studios shift to more elaborate productions under Run Run Shaw’s leadership. Filmed in color and replete with fantastic costumes, the film still shows much of Runde’s penny-pinching ways — the sets are uninspiring, the camera movement limited.

What pushes Diau Charn from the realm of “interesting documentation of a studio in transition” to a Shaw classic is the performance of Linda Lin Dai as Diau Charn, an orphan girl tasked with bringing down a corrupt official and his son, who she loves. Coquettish, conflicted and crestfallen Lin Dai won her second Best Actress for Diau Charn, and it’s the best performance I’ve seen her give in a Shaw film.

If it weren’t for Lin Dai, I doubt that Celestial Pictures would have gone through the trouble of restoring this film for DVD. To date, it’s the oldest Shaw film that they have released on DVD. And I don’t expect that they’ll release anything that pre-dates it. As far as Celestial is concerned, Diau Charn is the first Shaw Brothers movie.

Diau Charn
Dir: Li Han-hsiang
Released: May 29, 1958

1: I say ‘probably’ because the HKFA’s book Hong Kong Filmography 1953-1959 says that the first movie released under the Shaw Brothers name was 1959’s Day-Time Husband, while their other book The Shaw Screen states that it was the earlier The Magic Touch. I’m inclined to agree with the earlier date.

2: Most information in this paragraph comes from Stephon Teo’s Hong Kong: The Extra Dimensions.

3: The Shaw Screen and Hong Kong Filmography agree on this point.

4: The relevant part of the official Shaw history is here: http://tinyurl.com/272hxf

5: It’s not clear when a Shaw studio first made a color film. According to The Shaw Screen it may have been 1939’s Reunion. Like most Hong Kong studios in the 1950s, Shaw and Sons made very few color pictures. Interestingly, many of the films they did shoot in color featured either circus performers or erotic dancers from Japan^A. Make of that what you will.

5a: Hong Kong Filmography 1953-1959 is full of fascinating details like this one.

6: I can’t find any information on what film introduced Shaw’s trademark Shawscope.

7: Sam Ho in The Shaw Screen suggests that it was Runde. But the start of filming may have been after Run Run Shaw returned to take over the company.

8: The Heavenly Match according to Sam Ho in The Shaw Screen.

The Comedy of Mismatches

Don’t let the title fool you, A Comedy Of Mismatches is not what you expect. Remember when you read Shakespeare in high school and couldn’t figure out why the plays weren’t funny? Then the teacher explained that in Shakespeare’s time ‘comedy’ meant a play in which everyone got married, not a play in which Ben Stiller got kicked in the testicles.

There’s absolutely no testicle kicking in A Comedy Of Mismatches, but there is a lot of marrying and a lot of confused couples. After a chance meeting in a temple, two couples exchange tokens of affection. Unnerved by their screaming parents, the couples muff the hand-off — each girl gets the wrong boy’s fan and each boy gets the wrong girl’s hanky.

And since the tokens are monogrammed, each lover ends up with the wrong name. This would not be a problem, if the boys didn’t immediately arrange to marry the women they thought they met — hence the mismatches. Instead of being engaged to true love Liu Weiliang (Pat Ting Hung), the scholar Sun Yulang (Chin Feng) is actually engaged to a woman whose hanky he got by mistake.

Shenanigans with a third couple, who are mostly kept in the background, lead to the marriage of the Sun and Liu anyway. But thanks to a set of baroque coincides that only happen in romantic comedies, Sun is dressed up as a woman and Liu is wearing the groom’s robe.

While all these miscommunications and wacky situations could develop into comedy, they never quite do. Instead of pushing humor, A Comedy Of Mismatches sticks to romance. And even that never really fills out, thanks to the shapelessness of the characters. Beyond Liu’s desire for a good match, and Sun’s goofy humor, we never learn much about the couple or what they see in each other.

Instead of characterization, the film spends its final 10 minutes recapping in painful detail exactly what happened in the previous eighty minutes. Just in case it was unclear, I guess.

With a little more wit, or some development of its numerous couples, A Comedy Of Mismatches would be more memorable. Instead, I used it a cheap way to mention kicking Ben Stiller in the testicles.

The Comedy of Mismatches
Dir: Hsieh Chun, Law Chun
Released: May 14, 1964

The Female Prince

A cloistered woman denied true love by status-hungry parents? Yes. A man wrongly accused of a crime? It’s in there. Wait, isn’t this the same story as The Crimson Palm, a film that came out just six weeks before The Female Prince?

For about 20 minutes, it seemed that the Shaw studio was simply going to recycle the exact same story — again — and wait for the haungmei-hungry audiences to pay to see Ivy Ling Po cry her way through a grim tragedy — again.

Thankfully, The Female Prince instead of diving deeper and deeper into tragedy escalates this plot into an entertaining farce. Every time things look bleak for our heroines, Qin Feng Xiao (Ivy Ling Po), and her maid, Chun Lan (Li Ching), they simply lie cheat and charm their way out of the hangman’s noose, smiling all the while.

And with each lie, the pair find themselves in a more improbable situation and celebrating an other unlikely success — quickly followed by a new life-threatening crisis. The more Feng Xiao lies, and the more she rebels against the gender roles that have held her back, the brighter Ivy Ling Po shines. I’ve always enjoyed Ling Po’s comedic work more than her weepie work in films like The Crimson Palm — and The Female Prince gives full rein to her mischievous skills.

Ling Po’s undeniable charm is also the film’s most curious aspect. The Female Prince was the second of two haungmei films made by director Chow Sze-Loke and scriptwriter Chang Cheh. Chow came from the world of Cantonese filmmaking, where he worked in a huge variety of genres. Chang Cheh, not yet a famous director, had just joined Shaw Brothers as a screenwriter. His first film for Shaws, The Amorous Lotus Pan was a bold break from the female-focused films that Shaw Brothers had been making; instead of sympathizing with the female lead, Chang vilifies her and champions her revenge-hungry brother-in-law Wu Song.

But in The Female Prince, clever women are put center stage, bamboozling the bumbling men that threaten them with loveless marriages — very much a return to the traditional Shaw story that Chang railed against in his film critiques. Did Chang want to show Shaw that he could write a film in their style, or did the Shaw management ask him to tone down the blood? Maybe Chang just wanted to be faithful to the story’s operatic source. Regardless of the why, comparing the films provides an intriguing contrast between the Shaw styles of the early 60s and the style that would emerge in the late 60s — and this one’s fun to watch, to boot.

The Female Prince
Dir: Chow Sze-Loke
Released: December 10, 1964

The Crimson Palm

Film genres tend to follow a cyclical life-cycle: first, a film or two introduces a new genre; then, if the introductory films are successful, more films follow in the trailblazers’ wake. These first-wave films can be simple recreations of the original films — success begets imitation, after all —  or they might tweak the formula slightly, looking for an even more profitable result.

Eventually, the genre settles into a predictable rhythm. Producers find out what works and stick to the safe bets. As the genre begins to age and wear out its welcome, filmmakers begin to experiment, mutating the tried-and-true formula hoping to evolve it into something new. If this works, a new genre appears and the life-cycle begins anew. If not, the genre fades away.

Introduced in 1958, by 1964 the haungmei opera genre had settled into its quiet middle age; while some exceptional opera films were being made — Lady General Hua Mu Lan, for example — many more were simply following the successful huangmei formula.

The Crimson Palm falls into the latter camp, unfortunately. Despite the presence of hauangmei superstar Ivy Ling Po, little in the film elevates it above the mass of haungmei films released in the mid-60s. It’s never bad, it’s just lifeless.

Part of the problem may be the unavoidable familiarity of the plot. Most of the “star-crossed-lovers betrayed by the justice system” story-line mirrors 1963’s The Adultress. Even that film’s climactic ending reappears here — and it would be used again in 1965’s Inside The Forbidden City.

1964 would be the end of haungmei’s complacent middle age. In 1965, slightly more adventurous haungmei films began to appear: The Mermaid pushed special effects; The Grand Substitution reflected the growing trend of manly violence in Shaw films;Inside the Forbidden City kept the haungmei structure, but explored darker themes of revenge. None of this experimentation worked, however. Haungmei never managed to evolve into a new genre, and largely disappeared from Shaw Brothers by the late 1960s.

The Crimson Palm
Dir: Chen Yu-hsin
Released: October 28, 1964

Lovers' Rock

A refreshing change from Shaw Brothers' normally over-dramatic dramas, Lovers' Rock delivers the drama, but keeps the hysterics to a minimum. Instead of the usual credulity-straining trials of a star-crossed couple, director Pan Lei focuses on small town characters and a mostly believable love triangle.

Lovers' Rock was Pan Lei debut film with Shaw Brothers, but he wasn’t new to filmmaking. As a writer and director Pan had worked in the Taiwanese film industry since the late 1950s. To Shaw Brothers, Pan probably seemed the perfect package — an intelligent, literary director that had connections with a group of Taiwanese actors and experience working under Taiwan’s single-party, martial-law government. Could there be any better combination for a studio looking to expand their market share in the island nation?

And so Pan’s first film for the Hong Kong studio was filmed in Taiwan, with an almost all-Taiwanese cast (mostly actors that had, I expect, previously worked with Pan Lei) about a Taiwanese fishing village. Gee, I wonder who this film was made for?

Regardless of why Shaw Brothers hired Pan Lei, the studio ended up with a smart, flexible and talented filmmaker with some serious writing skills. While at Shaws, Pan worked in worked in nearly every genre. And with films like Lovers' Rock and The Fastest Sword, he beefed up normally thin genre films with thoughtful scripts and smart acting.

The plot of Lovers' Rock was pretty common fare in the early 1960s — doomed lovers and family dramas were the building blocks of most Shaw Brothers weepies. So when outsider Qin Yu (Chiao Chuang) falls for the coquettish but confusing Lin Qiuzi (Cheng Pei Pei), everything feels very familiar.

But Pan surrounds this plot with a mostly scruffy-looking assortment of character actors, many of whom worked with Pan Lei throughout his career, that provide the small fishing town with a believable population and a solid foundation for the action. This sort of attention to small roles was uncommon at the star-focused studio, as was Pan’s focus on strong, realistic acting.

Well, mostly strong acting. Lovers' Rock's main stumbling block is its male star, Chiao Chuang. I’ve never cared for his abilities as an actor and in Lovers' Rock he’s required to channel a James Dean attitude that he never achieves. The gruff, flawed character of fisherman Da Gui (Huang Chung Hsin) is always more interesting than Qin — it’s a shame he’s missing for one-third of the movie.

The third star, Cheng Pei Pei, would become a major Shaw actress after Lovers' Rock. But after 1966’s Come Drink With Me, it was rare to see her in modern-day roles. She acquits herself well here as the confused and confusing modern teenager Lin Qiuzi.

With Lovers' Rock, Pan Lei established himself as a unique voice at Shaw Brothers. Currently, only a smattering of his films are on DVD; I’m looking forward to seeing more.

Lovers' Rock
Dir: Pan Lei
Released: October 17, 1964