Shaw Brothers

Love Without End

All films are emotionally manipulative, or at least try. A film that wants its audience to feel nothing is waste of celluloid. Few films, however, exploit emotions as blatantly as Love Without End, which runs its audience through a ringer of romance and tragedy—with an emphasis on the latter. In no particular order the characters are afflicted with: blood cancer, stroke, bankruptcy, alcoholism, prostitution and airplane crashes. Every time someone picks up a phone, news of the latest disaster spills from the receiver.

Love Without End is, unmistakably, a ‘weepie’. Marlee MacLeod, a writer at my other site The Dual Lens, defines weepies in her guide to the genre, “the classic weepie generally involves some worst-case scenario—disease, unrequited love, family secrets, war and mental illness are the biggies.” In only two hours, Love Without End manages to cover most of those disasters. It’s a weepie overachiever.

Linda Lin Dai won her fourth Best Actress award for playing the thick-eyebrowed country girl Li Qingqing who, after a drunken Pengang (Kwan Shan)* pushes her on a night club stage, becomes a popular chanteuse and a Pengang’s girlfriend.

Then tragedy strikes. Repeatedly, frequently and brutally.

Why would anyone want to watch 2 hours of carefully orchestrated unhappiness? Marlee MacLeod suggests that weepies, by proxy, fulfill our desires for unhappiness, “We want to weep, to sacrifice, to have things fall apart without the inconvenience and unpleasantness of those things actually happening. We want contained suffering and we get it from weepies.”

Her “We” may be overly broad, since I almost always find weepies to be annoying. The characters lurch about, dragged by the strings held by the coincidence-laden script, never once saying the simple words that would end their tragedy, “I love you.” The weepies I’ve seen are erected on an elaborate house of cards that would crumble should the characters ever behave rationally.

Of course, by asking for realistic behavior from weepie characters, I’m revealing that I simply don’t get it. I am in the minority. Love Without End was a huge success in 1961 and was remade by Shaw in 1970. Its theme song, which is quite beautiful, remains a karaoke favorite.

Included on the disc are three bonus interviews with young Hong Kong artists reminiscing about Linda Lin Dai and the impact of Love Without End. On other Shaw Brothers DVDs these interviews have not been interesting; this disc is an exception. Theatrical director Edward Lam brilliantly discusses the career of Linda Lin Dai, the problems she faced as an aging (i.e., over 27) actress and her skills in both comedy and drama. Lam prefers her comedic work, and I agree. As the “Queen of the Asian screen” (as Shaw Brothers billed her), her ebullient personality, sharp wit and intelligent eyes worked better in strong-willed comedic roles than put-upon weepie heroines.

DVD Notes: While in widescreen Shaw Scope, the film is in black and white, an oddity for 1961. After 1958’s Diau Charn, Shaw released nearly all of their films in color. But, considering the film’s throwback appeal to the golden age of the weepies, black and white is a good aesthetic choice. The film does not suffer from the blurriness seen in other Shaw DVDs, but the frame has a tendency to shake and jitter in a couple of scenes. The DVD is not anamorphic.

Love Without End
Released: October 12, 1961
Doe Chin
HKmdb

*I am likely spelling the character’s name wrong. It’s an indication of his lowly status that no movie reference site lists his name. The movie belongs to Linda Lin Dai.

Les Belles

When discussing Shaw Brothers films, it’s easy to fall into the trap of comparing them directly with their Western counterparts. In my review of Enchanting Shadow I started down that path by mentioning how its scares were inferior to Western scares. What’s important to keep in mind is that Shaw was not trying to create Western films, but films that would sell to their markets: Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and south-east Asia. Watching Shaw Brothers (or any foreign film) as pure mimicry is a path to failure. They must be seen as local products that drew from popular, often Western, culture.

But Les Belles almost demands to be seen a mimic. A plot from Shop Around The Corner (reused by Hollywood in In The Good Old Summertime and You’ve Got Mail), music featuring the Latin styles popular in 1960 Hong Kong and a Hudson/Day style straight from Pillow Talk. If it weren’t in Mandarin, it would be hard to differentiate it from any number of late-50s, early 60s fluff romances made by Hollywood.

Yet for all of this, um, reimagineering, the film remains distinctly Chinese and targets the usual Shaw markets. The clumsy American-style musical numbers, with each dancer moving to her own unique, and off-beat, rhythm reveal the low importance of repeating Western styles. The low-key choreography would crumble under comparison to high-impact films like West Side Story. But the Chinese-opera style numbers, along with the odd “Tribute to Asia!” dance revue, feature stronger choreography and better design and, as a result, leave a stronger impression. Les Belles uses a typical shotgun approach from Shaw; the awkward and noisy Western routines may catch people’s eyes, but the elegant and muted Asian numbers sell the film.

Beyond the new musical styles and pop-modern setting, Les Belles was also an early foray by Shaw into the formats that would define their style, crystal clear color and cinemascope framing. As such, they were still working out the kinks. Scenes occasionally become soft, or downright blurry. This could be a problem with the DVD transfer, however.

After the tragic historical operas, this up (and off)-beat musical modern musical garnered a lot of acclaim for Shaw Brothers, won several awards and remains a welcome change from their other down-beat films. But, despite the films success, its Western style did not replace the more Chinese operas and romances that were the dominant genre at the time. It wasn’t until the mid-60s, when modern romances and swordplay films like The Blue And The Black and Come Drink With Me gained in popularity, that the operatic Chinese romance began to fade from Hong Kong screens. Shaw Brothers, like any intelligent business, sold what the public wanted—and that was something more than simple mimicry.

Les Belles
Released: February 2, 1961
Dir: Tao Qin
hkmdb