Shaw Brothers

Madam White Snake

Take a well-known myth, popular for hundreds of years, tweak it slightly, cast top celebrities in the leading roles and, voila, instant crowd pleaser. With almost every haungmei opera released by Shaw Brothers studio, the technique is the same. And, really, why shouldn’t it be? If the approach works, stick with it.

By the time Shaw Brothers studio was founded, the story of Madam White Snake was already over 1000 years old. Versions abounded, each with their own unique take on the tale of romance between mortal pharmacist Xu Xian (Chao Lei) and immortal snake spirit Bai She Chuan (Linda Lin Dai). Shaw combined some of the versions, adding some details here, removing some details there, and filmed the resulting musical in the standard haungmei style.*

Bai and her sister, the green snake spirit Qing (Margaret Tu Chuan), declare immortal life boring and lonely and decide to live amongst mortals, where Bai falls in love with the Xu Xian, partially because he, in a previous life, saved her from death. With Qing acting as matchmaker, the two quickly settle into marital bliss.

Most of the other versions of this story cast Qing not as a supporter of marriage, but as the romance’s doubting Thomas, warning Bai against the entire idea. Shaw’s conversion of Qing’s traditional role into an instrument of romance highlights a common Shaw trope—the role of the “second woman”—the cheerful, outspoken, id-laden sidekick without who romance would never flower. The problem with mythical Chinese heroes and heroines is that they are so impossibly proper that they can never express love or show any overt interest in a member of the opposite sex. That would simply be too scandalous.

The “second woman” however, suffers none of these restrictions. Brash, and fearless of humiliation, she forces the bashful couple into romance and matrimony, rarely finding love for herself. Sometimes, as in The Bride Napping, the “second woman” role is played by the film’s star. Usually, as in Madam White Snake, it’s a supporting role.

No Shaw marriage can remain unthreatened; enter Fahai, a powerful Buddhist monk to tries to reveal Bai’s slithery nature to the oblivious Xu. Religion is the unambiguous villain of Shaw’s telling of Madam White Snake. Fahai disrupts Bai’s marriage with a ferocity and malice unseen in older versions of the tale. His motives remain unexplored, turning him into little more than a paper-thing fanatic.

The biggest change implemented by Shaws is the film’s abrupt, almost absurd ending that excises most of the story’s final act, but caps the running time at a theater friendly 95 minutes. The swiftness of the conclusion detracts slightly from the film, otherwise an enjoyable example of Shaw’s haungmei style and their reworking of Chinese classics. But, I guess even millennia-old tales must bend to the realities of movie economics.

Side note: One of the biggest names in the standardization of the Shaw Brothers style has to be Japanese cinematographer Tadashi Nishimoto. Madam White Snake was his first haungmei film to hit the big screen (confusingly, he started working on Beyond The Great Wall three years earlier, but it wouldn’t be released for another 2 years). He obviously got the hang of the genre quickly, moving on to work on classics like Love Eterne and The West Chamber.

Madam White Snake
Dir: Yue Feng
Released: October 12, 1962

Dream Of The Red Chamber

Where possible, I am watching and reviewing these films in chronological order. It’s a valiant effort, but an impossible goal, as the DVDs are not being released in chronological order. So, after spending the past month or two watching films released in 1967 and 1968, I am thrown back to 1962, and the world of Yellow Plum opera, with The Dream Of The Red Chamber .

With the exception of the singing, not much has changed.

Oh, sure, there’s no sign of a World War II setting, and the male lead is played by a woman, but at the core of the film, underneath all its theatrical garments, reflects the same fascination with morality and tragedy. But it’s not as if Shaw introduced these themes into Chinese art, The Dream Of The Red Chamber was almost 200 years old by the time Shaw made their film, and theirs was only one of many, the first being made in the 1930s.

Like most classical Chinese novels, The Dream Of The Red Chamber is a  towering work; a daunting 120 chapters details the life and collapse of the Jia family—wealthy beyond description but lacking in male heirs. Bao Yu (Yam Kit), the only grandson of the Jia matriarch, is petulant and arrogant, more willing to revel in the freedoms that come with wealth than the responsibilities.

Bao Yu’s one redeeming feature is his love for his orphaned cousin Lin Pai Yu (Betty Loh Tih). However, every time he pledges his love, he turns around and plays grab-ass with a maid; Bao Yu does not excel at fidelity.

Bao Yu can’t shoulder all of the blame; the entire Jia family struggles with morality. With only one marriage to arrange, and very little to occupy the rest of the time, the family’s female leaders fill their days with duplicitous politics and gossip while the family’s few men simper and bow, leaving everything up to their wives or servants. Every inch of the Jia’s massive palace gleams with wealth, but it covers a hollow and dusty moral core.

Poor Pai Yu. Thrown into this lion’s den after her mother’s death, she is the film’s innocent, unaware of the suspicion and hate she attracts, simply because she has some semblance of morality. Her one hope is Bao Yu’s love; and that’s not exactly reliable. She crumbles under the weight of the combined schemes of aggressive debutant Bao Chai (Pat Ting Hung), two-faced gadfly Wang Xi Feng (Go Bu Shu) and protective mistress Xi Ren (Ding Ling).

When the first incarnation of Shaw Brothers studios, Shanghai’s Unique Film Productions, formed in 1925, one of its goals was to free Chinese plays from the restrictions of the stage.^* Film, unlike plays, can easily move from day to night, from city to country and from year to year. But the flexibility of film is nothing compared to the luxury of space afforded to novels. Red Chamber’s original 120 chapters detailed the lives of hundreds of characters, layering them with depth and motivation that the film simply can not match.

Like Shaw’s other literary adaptations, Red Chamber cuts out most of the background details and focuses on the main action; those familiar with the book will likely have no problem. I, on the other hand, had to watch the film twice before I could figure out who everyone was.

But, although the film lacks the splash of Shaw’s higher-profile haungmei, its stripped down story remains effective, retaining the religious and moral lessons that elevate it above pure melodrama. Director Yuan Chiu-feng, an inexperienced director working on his first huangmei film, could have made the story and the message easier to follow; but his efforts are not as disastrous as some critics make them out to be.

^* Zhou Chengren “Shanghai’s Unique Film Productions and Hong Kong’s Early Cinema.” The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study.
Available from the Hong Kong Film Archives, this book is a treasure trove of information.

Dream Of The Red Chamber
Released: August 3, 1962
Dir: Yuan Qiufeng

The Bride Napping

At first blush—as the movie fills its super-wide frame with a historical setting, beautiful women (including the dreamy Betty Loh Tih) and a prediction of romance—it would be easy to mistake The Bride Napping for a “Yellow Plum” opera, an extremely popular genre in Hong Kong that was just beginning to fade in 1962 as Bride Napping hit theaters.

But as the plot’s mistaken-identities, cutting jibes and social satires pile up, The Bride Napping transforms into a screwball comedy in historical dress. The film’s sole musical number—certainly the most beautiful Shaw Brothers musical number I’ve heard—discards the simple structure and rural sound of the “Yellow Plum” genre for a complex, striking and modern ballad.

That one musical interlude aside, the film stays close to the rules of romantic screwball comedies, cementing the romance of Lie Yuen Ying (Ding Ling) and Pien Chi (Kiu Chong)—a rich man’s daughter and a down-on-his-luck scholar—in the first ten minutes and then postponing consummation and audience satisfaction with a combination of capers, confusion and cross-dressing. The Bride Napping’s two-hour length is almost epic for Hong Kong cinema and the film does bog down towards the end as the rapidly growing pile of misunderstandings and antics stretch the genre’s loose boundaries of believability.

Besides its unusual length, The Bride Napping adds a few twists to the screwball romance genre; Betty Loh Tih, undeniably the movie’s star, disappears as the film concludes. Witty, intelligent and outspoken, she’s the Katherine Hepburn in this Bringing Up Baby. But, unlike Hepburn, she doesn’t get the man. A more streamlined plot would have combined the two female leads into a single role and let Betty Loh Tih have all the fun.

Bride Napping is also one of the first romantic comedies to resolve the confusion through melee combat. By 1966, Shaw Brothers would be known for its swordplay choreography, but The Bride Napping shows Shaw’s gymnastics in a very primitive form. I suspect that these awkward fights, more typical of a local dinner theater, are not the ultimate example of late-50s/early-60s Hong Kong fight choreography, but they do show a more stage-bound and hesitant style that had not yet been absorbed and adapted by Shaw Brothers studio.

The Bride Napping
Released: 1962
Yen Chun
hkmdb