Shaw Brothers

The Adultress

Like the previous year's Yang Kwei Fei, 1963's The Adultress adapts a famously tragic story into a showcase for Li Li-hua. Unlike Yang Kwei Fei, The Adultress doesn't have to excise chunks of its source material in order to make its star likable. The result is not only a more coherent film, but a far better performance from its prolific star.

Adapted from an opera, and maybe from an even older story, The Adultress retains is musical heritage, but it's hard to think of it in the same category as Shaw's other early 60s musicals. Although classified as a haungmei film, The Adultress' songs are few and far between, usually only appearing at the moments of strongest emotion. The rest of the film is plain-spoken drama, free to focus on its story of corrupted justice and the painful sacrifices of unrequited lovers Xiao Bai and Yang Nai Wu.

Sold into marriage as a child, Xiao Bai (Li Li-hua) pines for her brief but unfulfilled love affair with the gifted scholar Yang Nai Wu (Kwan Shan). Though she loves Yang, Xiao Bai remains faithful to her sullen husband, Xiao Du (Zhu Mu). Not that the gossipy villagers care, their endless taunting only enflames Xiao Du's jealousy.

After catching the eye of Liu (Peter Kang Kwan), son of the local magistrate, Xiao Bai is drugged and raped by her spoiled stalker. Shamed and afraid, she won't tell her husband about the attack. But the jealous husband spots the evidence of Liu's attack and immediately blames Yang.

After Xiao Du is killed by an increasingly creepy Liu, Xiao Bai and Yang are accused of murder and thrown onto the non-existent mercy of the Chinese courts.

Corrupt judges, bribed witnesses and confessions extracted via torture--these and other various brutalities of the Chinese judicial system consume most of the rest movie. It's all very dramatic and nerve-wracking, and excellent work from both Kwan Shan and Li Li-hua makes the already compelling story more engrossing.

Unlike many Shaw Brothers weepies, its very hard to guess how The Adultress will end. Most Shaw dramas clearly telegraph their stories, relying on the over-the-top emotion to draw audiences in. I imagine that the story was familiar enough to Chinese audiences that they would already have known the ending. But it was all new to me and I was glad that the film kept me on my toes.

In Yang Kwei Fei, Li Li-hua had to work against the abbreviated film in order to deliver an appealing performance. But in The Adultress she could work with the strong story and dramatic direction to deliver a great performance.

The Adultress
Dir: Ho Meng-hua & Li Han-siang
Released: August 9, 1963

Return of the Phoenix

One of the few huangmei diao comedies, Return Of The Phoenix delivers a light alternative to the genre’s usually overwrought plots — and romance, of course. You can’t have huangmei diao without romance.

As with most huangmei films, the plot is whipped-foam light. Mu  (Chin Feng), a young fighter from a disgraced family, is engaged to Xue-e (Lee Heung-gwan), beautiful youngest daughter of a former general. But through the machinations of Xueyan, the general’s oldest and least attractive daughter, Mu believes that he’s engaged to a deluded, slutty reject.

Meanwhile, Xue-e’s also being pursued by another admirer, Prince Chu (Cheung Kwong-Chiu), the moronic bucktoothed nephew of the Emperor. Let the comedy begin!

Most of the comedy comes from mistaken identity and the unattractiveness of the Xueyan and Chu. And, for the most part, it’s pretty simplistic stuff. Unlike The Bride Napping, another comedy with huangmei roots, there’s nothing very witty about Return of the Phoenix, despite the presence of two of Shaw’s best comic actors, Go Bo Shu and Cheung Kwong-Chiu.

At least there was nothing that witty in what I saw. But I’m severely handicapped when it comes to huangmei films. With their simple music and familiar plots, one of the main draws of huangmei films was their lyrics. Since I don’t speak Mandarin, I’m going to miss any puns, allusions or bon mots that might be hiding in the words. I’m entirely dependent on the subtitles, and subtitles have a way of hiding humor.

So it’s possible that Return Of The Phoenix may be the funniest thing since a drunk Oscar Wilde. I wouldn’t know.

Return of the Phoenix
Dir: Kao Li & Li Han-hsiang
Released: July 24, 1963

Empress Wu

They typical Shaw Brothers approach to adapting a popular novel or opera for the screen was to assume that the audience already knew the story; this way, the film could skip to the good parts without worrying too much about back story.

When it came to historical dramas, the studio took much the same approach. When telling the story of China’s only female emperor, Shaw assumed that most of the audience would know the rough outline of Wu Zetian’s life. So they can skip or alter most of the historical nuances and jump right to the good stuff.

But really, who wants to hear about musty history when an actress as great as Li Li Hua is giving such a fantastic performance? Not me, that’s for sure. Empress Wu was made when common attitudes about China’s sole Empress were changing. Reviled for years for her violations or Confucian ethics and gender roles, Wu Zetian’s reputation was on the rise in the 60s as Chinese women began to expand beyond traditional roles.

Besides, when your audience is primarily female, as Shaw’s was in the early 60s, do you really want to make a film that vilifies China’s only female ruler?

Empress Wu walks the historical fence, alternately portraying Wu as feminist icon, cruel dictator and wanton hussy. And Li Li Hua moves effortlessly between these extremes, casually beheading a man in one scene and crying over a wayward child in the next.

Of course, to reenforce the story, the film plays fast and loose with historical accuracy, skipping over many of Empress Wu’s harsher actions, inflating the cruelty of her enemies and greatly simplifying the political machinations which allowed her to rule China. Shaw’s changes only soften Wu’s image, making her bitter aspects easier to swallow.

So don’t watch Empress Wu for a history lesson; Shaw Brothers never saw themselves as a didactic film studio. Instead watch it for the grand acting of Li Li Hua and the artistic pageantry of director Li Han-Hsiang.

Empress Wu
Dir: Li Han-Hsiang
Released: June 14, 1963

Between Tears and Smiles

It’s hard picture it in today’s world of celebrity-driven cinema, but the studios used to be the stars of the screen. When the studios owned their own theaters, and maintained their own stable of stars, there were qualitative differences between their films. Studios were brand names. It was possible to be a Warner Brothers fan or a United Artists aficionado.

In its heyday, Shaw Brothers was the biggest studio brand in South-east Asia. When battling films from competitors like MP & GI, the publicity focused on the greatness Shaw actors, the skill of the Shaw directors and, of course, the pleasures of ShawVision.

The putative power of the Shaw Brothers brand is on full display in Between Tears And Smiles, After rival MP & GI announced that they were adapting the popular 1930s serial fiction “Ti Xian Yin Yuan” (which is also translated as “Fate in Tears and Laughter”), Shaw Brothers lept into frantic action. The year before, they had beat MP & GI to the big screen with Love Eterne and they knew the value of being first.

So, with a script written by everyone on the studio, they started round-the-clock production of Between Tears and Smiles, and the publicity trumpeted it as the greatest collection of Shaw stars, directed by all of the Shaw directors. (The film’s credits, however, list Lo Chen as the director.) In about a month, the film was done.

All of the elements were in place for an utter disaster. A frenzied production schedule, a script written by committee, a dozen directors and the endless cameo appearances necessary to squeeze all the major Shaw stars onto the screen.

So the most surprising aspect of Between Tears And Smiles is that it’s mostly pretty good. Despite all the corners that had to be cut, the film retains the original story’s tale of melancholy lovers controlled by unalterable fate. And the widescreen black and white image — color film was abandoned to save time — is luxurious.

After exploring an alley full of acrobats, magicians and other street performers (this is where the film is most cameo heavy), affluent student Fan Jia Shu (Kwan Shan) meets opera singer Shen Feng Shian (Li Li-hua) and kung fu entertainer Kwan Sau Chu (Ivy Ling Po). Both women fall for Fan, but fate puts him in the arms of Shen.

Also in love with Fan is Ho Li Shia, the wealthy daughter of a local warlord who happens to look exactly like Shen Feng Shian (Li Li-hua played both roles). To Ho’s dismay, Fan refuses to abandon Shen for the richer Ho — he loves Shen’s spirit, not just her looks.

But the cackling, buffonish and evil General Wang (Ching Miao) is very much in love with Shen’s looks, kidnapping the girl and forcing her to be his bride.  What will become of Fan and Shen’s love? And what about the heartbroken Kwan?

The original story, I’m sure, went into great detail about Kwan, Ho and all of the other characters that barely get any screen time in the Shaw Brothers film. This was a common problem with Shaw’s literary adaptations — in order to squeeze typically gigantic Chinese novels into two hours, most of the details had to be dropped.

Even with these cuts, Between Tears and Smiles still builds a believable romance between Shen and Fan and Ivy Ling Po still pulls heartstrings with her longing looks and teary eyes. The film’s ambiguous ending is another high point. Instead of wrapping everything up in a neat package, as the studio was wont to do, the film ends on a subtly sour note — maybe fate isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.

Between Tears and Smiles
Dir: Collective
Released: January 18, 1964

Three Sinners

In the 10 years that Shaw Brothers produced haungmei operas, they were able to keep the genre lively by mixing up their approaches. Some films were more traditionally operatic, almost as if Shaw had left the cameras running at a local stage production. Other films, like Yueh Feng’s The Three Smiles, took greater advantage of cinema’s flexibility, mixing in special effects and other flourishes that the more traditional films never explored.

Three Sinners falls on traditional end of the bell curve, eschewing fancy effects and focusing on the singing, sleeve waving and time-honored posing that Chinese operas are known for.

To be honest, the more traditional the film, the harder it is for me to review. So many of the details go right over my head. Are the actors singing well? Did he do that sleeve flourish correctly? I honestly don’t know.

Here’s what I do know, Yan Xijiao (Li-Li Hua) sells herself to Song Jiang (Yen Chuan) in order to pay for her father’s funeral. Yan thinks she’s become Song’s concubine, but Song only paid because he was impressed by Yan’s filial piety. Instead of a concubine, he’d prefer that Yan simply get on with her life. But, for Yan, that would be even more improper (Chinese gender politics can sometimes be puzzling). Song acquiesces and buys a house for Yan and her mother (Chen Yen-yen). After months of visits, he eventually falls for Yan. When she attracts the unwanted attentions of Song’s student, Zhang Wuyuan (Mei Yan Sheng), Song accuses her of infidelity and the characters hurtle towards their just deserts.

But are they really all sinners, as per the accusatory title? Zhang is guilty of any number of crimes, from stalking to rape. Song’s crime is jumping to conclusions and treating Yan with unwavering cruelty. But what is Yan’s sin? If she can be slighted for anything, it’s being too proper; her filial piety and shame prevents her from accusing Zhang or telling Song the truth.

If Sinners needs another villain, it has one in the gossipy townspeople that doom Yan with their endless whispered innuendo. But that would change the title of the movie to Several Dozen Sinners or something even less wieldy.

For 100 minutes, Sinners sticks to its traditional approach, abandoning the technique at the end for ten minutes of cinematic flash. It’s not a coincidence that these ten minutes were my favorite part of the film. I prefer the more cinematic operas over the more traditional approaches. Not only do I feel less lost, but I figure that if you’re going to go to the trouble of making a movie, you should at least take advantage of the medium.

The Three Sinners
Dir: Yen Chuan
Released: November 23, 1963

A Maid From Heaven

In 1958, when Shaw Brothers began filming Yellow Plum operas, the romantic leads were played by a man and a woman. Five years later, the leads were often filled with two women, one playing the male role. Why? In an interview about Love Eterne, Ang Lee points out that two female leads was traditional casting, and he’s right. Chinese opera has a long tradition, older than the relatively youthful Yellow Plum, of actors and actresses in drag.

But Lee goes farther, “To have seen a real man expressing romantic feelings for a woman on the screen would have been too strong for the audiences then. China was a very repressed society.” If that’s true, then 1958’s Kingdom And The Beauty, with its unsubtle bedding of Linda Lin Dai by a man—a man played by a man—must have blown their minds. But Kingdom was exceptionally popular, and I can find no trace of scandal surrounding its release, suggesting that Lee embelished China’s repression. Paradoxically, the genre became more traditional as the world around it became more modern. Why?

My guess is this; Shaw realized that the genre was popular among the Chinese diaspora, especially in Taiwan, because it presented a slice of traditional China, a connection to the ‘old country’ that was rapidly disintigrating under Mao’s government. To satisfy this audience, they pushed the films back in time, tying them to the old ways and traditions for which millions pined. If Shaw could win the hearts of the expatriates, they would win at the box office.

A Maid From Heaven is a classic example of a Yellow Plum targeted straight at the diaspora. Starring two women, including Ivy Ling Po (fresh from the success of Love Eterne), Maid is based on one of the better known Yellow Plum stories, which, in turn, was based on Chinese mythology. If that’s not traditionalism, I don’t know what is.

The plot is typical for Yellow Plum: the youngest daughter (Fang Ying) of the Jade Emperor, ruler of heaven, falls for a mortal man, Tong Yong (Ivy Ling Po, playing a man again) and, using her mystical connections, marries him and frees him from indentured servitude. And, since this is Chinese opera we’re talking about, it all ends tragically.

The downbeat ending may be a given, but most of Maid is as fluffy as its heavenly sets; it’s happier playing with fun with romantic songs, fantastical effects and a retinue of Chinese gods and spirits. A well-known story, ancient myths and traditional opera—a perfect cure for homesickness. Maid is certainly not the best of the Yellow Plum bunch, I find Ivy Ling Po to be zealously ingratiating and Fang Ying is little more than a pretty face, but it’s a good example of the line Shaw walked in the early 60s between a modern Asia finding a unique identity and an exiled culture yearing for home.

A Maid From Heaven
Released: December 11, 1963
Chen Yu-hsin, Ho Meng-hua
HKmdb

Note: The Ang Lee interview with Rick Lyman was published March 9, 2001 in the New York Times

Love Eterne

When we watch The Wizard Of Oz, we’re not stunned when Dorothy returns to Kansas, right? And no one is surprised when Luke blows up the Death Star, correct? But yet, even when we’ve memorized the entire story, we keep returning to a few stories, not because they shock us with new details but because the presentation of these well-worn myths continues to grab our attention.

It’s all presentation; an important rule to remember when watching The Love Eterne, a Yellow Plum opera that was so popular that audiences knew the story and the song backward and forwards long before the film opened. Shaw Brothers had to rush their production to the screen because another company was making the exact same film. After its release it played in Shaw theaters, especially in Taiwan, for years. Ang Lee, who was growing up in Taiwan at the time, remembers that some claimed to have seen the film over 500 times. Run Run Shaw ruled that anyone who saw it more than 100 times no longer had to pay. It’s a cultural touchstone, and it’s all in the presentation.

Ying Tai (Betty Loh Tih), a girl bored with the isolated life of women, dresses as a man in order to attend school where she falls in love with student Liang Shan Bo (Ivy Ling Po). When her secret love and gender are revealed to Shan Bo, the two plan a wedding that leads, inevitably, to exaggerated tragedy.

The story may be basic, even for the normally straightforward Yellow Plum genre, but it’s planted in fertile thematic ground—the struggle between personal freedom and filial responsibility. Love Eterne’s popular topic and largely un-showy direction only boosted the film’s wide appeal, I’m sure.

But Eterene’s biggest draw, I think, is its presentation of a slice of mythic historical China in traditional theatrical dress, using the southern opera style of women playing men’s roles. Betty Loh Tih may be playing a women dressed as a man, but her male lover is also played by a woman, Ivy Ling Po, who was forever typecast as a woman playing a man. Many of the background characters at the school, all of whom are supposed to be men, are played by women. 10 years later, Shaw Brothers would be fetishizing the male body in its kung fu films, but in Love Eterne, as in most of their 60s output, it’s all about the women.

Well, women and songs. Lots and lots of songs. So many songs, in fact, that the DVD is broken down, not by chapter, but by musical number. The speaking script probably strained to fill two pages while the musical numbers filled a four-album set. Now, here’s were many viewers will get off the boat; Yellow Plum operas used a very basic and repetitive song structure and, at the end of Love Eterne, it feels like the same song has been on repeat for over two hours. It’s hard to imagine these songs being family favorites, but they were. Considering the enduring popularity of sing-a-long Sound Of Music, perhaps Love Eterne’s success makes sense.

Love Eterne was filmed about the time that construction was finishing up on Movietown, the Shaw Brothers studio that, eventually, could hold up to twelve concurrent productions. The film shows the advantages and disadvantages of the Shaw approach. Each set could be changed to suit the season needed; so as Eterne moves from a bright romance to a sour tragedy, the sets morph from lively ponds to brackish weeds. But, as Li Han-Hsiang tries to convincingly make the single pond set look like a river...or a different pond...or a lake, the constraints of studio shooting become apparent.

Love Eterne
Released: April 3, 1963
Li Han-hsiang
HKmdb

Love Parade

Never afraid of repeating a successful formula, Shaw Brothers reunited the team of Les Belles in 1961’s Love Parade, another romantic musical comedy featuring Latin rhythms, beautiful people and exquisite pop-modern production design. But, perhaps realizing the awkwardness of the dancing in Les Belles, director Doe Chin and Shaw Brothers replaced the scenes of women dancing gamely to hot cha cha numbers with fashion shows in which women simply stand while an off-screen voice sings about the vagaries of women’s fashion. This is not a manly film.

Like Rock Hudson and Doris Day, Peter Chen Ho and Linda Lin Dai resume their Les Belles roles with only minor modifications. Dai retains her spunky, intelligent and romantic nature but transforms from a dancer to a gynecologist, certainly a step up in the career ladder, if not a huge leap out of the realm of “women’s jobs.” Chen Ho remains fussy, grumpy and lonely but now designs women’s clothing instead of choreographing dances. Could a male romantic lead in the West ever carry off those two roles without sniggering from the audience? Unlikely. But, again, Love Parade isn’t concerned with male opinions of masculinity.

Where Les Belles concerned itself with romance, and the antics that kept the couple from realizing their nuptial dreams, Love Parade worries only about life after marriage. Dai and Ho meet cute and fall in love with a minimum of fuss. Perhaps because the audience has presumably already seen these character types fall in love in Les Belles, Parade focuses on consummation, making the entire film a delayed orgasm that blue-balls the characters’ happiness and the audience’s expectations until the final scene.

But, honestly, the romantic miscommunications of near-strangers are far more interesting and believable than those of newlyweds, who presumably like each other enough to have a civil, and confusion-ending, conversation. The various stumbles and innuendo that keeps our couple from getting down to business after the wedding are simply irritating and I began to hope the movie would return to the fashion runway. Thank goodness the final 30 minutes features another “Tribute to Asia!” in true Les Belles style.

Having included the major Shaw Brothers markets in the dance tribute of Les Belles, Doe Chin reaches out to the forgotten nations—or perhaps new Shaw territories—in Love Parade: India, the Philippines and, oddly, France are feted in the fashion finale. Unsurprisingly, China steals the show with a temple full of women in classical Chinese dresses—the kind replicated so beautifully in Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love—that put the sarongs, kimonos and Parisian ball gowns to shame.

Love Parade
Released: January 22, 1963 (some sources claim 1961, but most claim 1963)
Doe Chin
HKmdb

*Note: As with Les Belles, the picture of Love Parade occasionally goes out of focus. As I suspected, this is not a problem with the film, but with the DVD. Read this interview for more information.