Shaw Brothers

Pink Tears

Chin Chien’s first feature for Shaw Brothers, Pink Tears presaged the work he’d do for the studio over the next five years — small-budget wenyi weepies that exhibit flashes of creativity amidst long dry spells of wrote formula.

Pink Tears also paired Chin Chien with star Julie Yeh Feng for the first time. Like Chin Chien, Yeh Feng had recently moved over to Shaw after a long career in the film industry. Neither stayed with Shaw Brothers for very long — Chin Chien committed suicide in 1969, Yeh Feng retired from film in 1970 — but the pair made two more movies together that continued Chin Chien’s tradition of erratic output — the terrible Unfinished Melody and the creative Farewell, My Love.

In Pink Tears, Julie Yeh Feng plays Bai Lilan, a hooker with the heart of gold. Widowed after giving birth to her first child, she’s sold her looks to pay for her daughter’s care. Although her high-rolling lifestyle has made her dangerously ill, she still pushes herself — spending late nights at parties and the rest of her time with her daughter, Xiaolan (Fung Bo Bo).

When Xiaolan’s music teacher, Zhang Zhi Ping (Ling Yuen), discovers Bai’s dual lives, he’s shocked. How can a courtesan also be a good mother? After Bai’s illness gets worse, he convinces her to give up being a kept woman and marry him. Damn what society thinks, Zhang promises, their love will prevail.

If you’ve ever seen a wenyi film, you can probably guess how well Zhang’s promise holds up.

Other than Julie Yeh Feng’s raucous rendition of the film’s theme song, and a few melodramatic cliff hangers, Pink Tears doesn’t really stand out amongst the wenyi crowd.

Pink Tears
Dir: Chin Chien
Released: May 27, 1965

Sons of Good Earth

Who would expect a rousing, flag waiving pean to patriotism to begin with a 30-minute remake of An American In Paris? Not me, that’s for sure. But that’s exactly what the first third of Sons of Good Earth is, all the way down to the incidental music that sounds straight out of the MGM vault.

Struggling painter Yu Ri narrates the opening, introducing his town and its residents. Unlike Gene Kelly film, Yu Ri’s not worried about being broke, but about the weightier matter of the imminent Japanese invasion of China.

After helping a pretty girl, He Hua (Betty Loh Tih), out of trouble with an abusive mistress, Yu Ri, his sidekick friend Guan Shan Sheng (Lee Kwan) and He Hua all settle into a cosy lighthearted life; at no point to they sing “Good Morning,” but the local kids do entertain them with a patriotic song about crushing the Japanese.

I’ve seen An American in Paris and Singing in the Rain countless times, and it was disconcerting to see them remolded so drastically. Not that King Hu does a bad job, in fact he captures the MGM spirit quite well. But I never expected to see Gene Kelly’s joie de vive mixed with anti-Japanese jingoism.

Eventually the movie has to address the war, and the MGM homage is dropped in favor of a more standard WWII drama plot. Collaborationist conspire against Yu Ri and He Hua; the lecherous Japanese general rapes Chinese women and brave Chinese men form a guerilla army.

Eventually the film devolves into all out warfare, with Yu Ri mounting the barricades and wielding a rifle like a lifelong soldier. Rousing, no doubt. But the best aspects of the film and completely discarded. Betty Loh Tih disappears for the last third of the film and Peter Chen Ho, a gifted comic actor, looks quite out of place gutting a Japanese soldier with a sword.

Sons of Good Earth was King Hu’s solo directorial debut, and it’s most unlike his later films. But its mixture of the genial and the brutal can be seen in his wuxia films like Come Drink With Me and Dragon Inn. But he never made another musical.

Sons of Good Earth
Dir: King Hu
Released: May 6, 1965

Songfest

Essentially a low-budget remake of the previous year’s The Shepherd Girl, Songfest drives the folk musical idea into the ground by failing to find any new ground in the genre.

Swapping the excellent Juile Yeh Feng for the barely palatable Margaret Tu Chuan is only one of Songfest's many faults. The singing is badly dubbed, the story is barely fleshed out and the lead couple irritated me enough that I wished them eternal misery.

Songfest does have some redeeming qualities; the music is more varied and its male lead, Chiao Chuang, is capable of acting (unlike Kwan Shan in Shepherd Girl). The singing competition between Song Yu Lan (Margaret Tu Chuan) and a half-dozen suitors is fantastic, bizarre and hilarious. After defeating a series of singing ringers, Yu sings against a motley crew of Chinese caricatures s including a dwarf, a hunchback and an inbred fisherman.

If only Songfest had ended there, instead of tacking on another fifteen minutes of pointlessness. Even then the movie only manages a sparse 75 minute running time.

Songfest essentially killed the folk musical. As far as I know, it would be two years before Shaw would try the genre again with 1967’s Moonlight Serenade.

Songfest
Dir: Yuan Chiu-feng
Released: February 19, 1965

The Mermaid

When Shaw started producing haungmei operas, their films were only the latest step in China’s millennia long cultural evolution. What began as spoken tales transformed into poems, poems into operas and operas into other operatic styles.

In the early 1900s, operas jumped onto film — much like US films, the first Chinese movies were of famous stage scenes. As films got longer, it was only natural that the Chinese would adapt their operas again, this time for the screen.

Shaw’s 1965 version of The Mermaid is just the latest mutation of a story that is least as old as the Ming dynasty (14th to 17th century), when it was collected into a book of tales about Judge Bao, himself a mix of legend and reality from the 11th century.

Even after 10 centuries tales like The Mermaid retain a surprising vitality. While Shaw’s production never abandons the traditions of opera, it’s not afraid to take advantage of the possibilities provided by film — special effects, split screen and other tricks impossible on the stage.

The film also cemented a new tradition, the pairing of Ivy Ling Bo and Li Ching, who would take the lead roles in most of Shaw’s remaining haungmei films. Bo, of course, was already a star. Since 1963’s The Love Eterne, she’d starred in a number of Shaw’s haungmei operas. Li Ching was a new actress, only 17 when The Mermaid was released; but she was a quickly rising star. Her performance won a Best Actress award and made her a leading lady well into the 70s.

In The Mermaid the actresses take their traditional roles — Ivy Ling Bo as the poor scholar Zhang Zhen and Li Ching as the beauties Peony and the Carp Spirit, an immortal who falls for the mortal Zhang Zhen and, impersonating the spoiled Peony, marries him.

Once the Carp Spirit’s deception is discovered, the film excels, taking full advantage of split screens and other effects to have the real Peony and the carp Peony on screen. Yeah, yeah, split screen is not a fancy high-tech trick, but the film has a lot of fun with the idea of duplication, making its second half a lot more fun than its less jovial beginning.

The Mermaid
Dir: Kao Li
Released: January 29, 1965

The Lark

If you like Mandarin pop from the early 60s, then you’ll likely enjoy The Lark, which is nothing more than than the barest framework of plot thrown up around song after song by chanteuse Carrie Ku Mei.

A simple tale—bumbling journalist Liu Shitai (Peter Chen Ho) trying to cozen a bit of dirt from singer Xiaoyun’s (Carrie Ku Mei) past in order to please his editor (a particularly ludicrous looking Tien Feng)—fills the gaps between the musical numbers. You get no points for guessing what happens after Xiaoyun & Liu spend a day gazing into each other’s eyes.

The plot’s irrelevance is underlined when all its loose ends are wrapped up 20 minutes before the film’s end—twenty minutes that are filled with four cameo-laden song & dance numbers.

The film’s songs and plots rarely overlap; unlike Western musicals from the 50s & 60s, the songs don’t advance the story and usually aren’t motivated by the characters. This is generally true of Shaw musicals, but it’s especially true for The Lark. In this respect The Lark is closer to the Mandarin chaqu musicals of the 1950s, in which the songs were wholly separate from the story—they even put the lyrics on screen to encourage sing-alongs.

The Lark’s musical scenes don’t include lyrics or a bouncing ball, but the songs were likely familiar enough to the audience that such aids were unnecessary. I’m sure that everyone had heard the theme song from Love Without End at least once before.

Indeed, the musical bits of The Lark are good enough that the plot becomes a bit of an irritant, especially the unending slapstick between Liu’s sister (Go Bo Shu) and her husband (Cheng Kwong-Chao). Both are funny, but the film relies on them too heavily. At two hours long, The Lark would have done well to ditch either some story or some songs; I vote for story.

The Lark
Dir: Xue Qun
Released: July 29, 1965

The Lotus Lamp

Stars who die young are doubly cursed. Not only are they dead, but they leave behind a few films that can never live up to the glowing reputation that invariably surrounds the prematurely departed.

I realize that sounds glib, placing a poor film performance on the same level as an early, usually tragic death. I’m not trying to belittle these stars or their deaths, only point out that they were more fallable than their post-mortem deifications would lead us to believe.

Linda Lin Dai is one of the best remembered Hong Kong stars of the 50s and 60s. When she committed suicide in 1964, Linda Lin Dai was working on at least two films, the epic The Blue And The Black and the haungmei opera The Lotus Lamp.*

Of the two, The Lotus Lamp was the closest to completion, so it lacks the jagged, Frankenstein edges of The Blue And The Black. But, like that WWII melodrama, The Lotus Lamp shows an actress that time and the Shaw Brothers studio had left behind.

Originally, Lin was meant to share the screen in The Lotus Lamp with Cheng Pei Pei and Ivy Ling Po—Lin playing the motherly Goddess San and Ling Po playing her teenaged son Chen Xiang—a symbolic changing of the guard with Lin graduating to Shaw’s “older women” roles and passing her mantle on to Ling and Chang. But Lin fought the casting, pushing Ling Po out of the film (although she still provides some of the singing voices) and taking two of the film’s three starring roles.

Lin was well-suited for the role of Goddess San, an immortal who falls for and marries the mortal scholar Liu (Cheng Pei Pei). Playing Goddess San required a certain regal bearing and a motherly concern, traits that Linda Lin Dai could exude in her sleep. San, however, exits the movie early when Three Eyed God (Tien Feng), the protector of heavenly purity, and his companion, Sky Dog (a shape shifting German Shepard who should have his own cartoon series—The Adventures Of Sky Dog!) discovers San and Liu’s forbidden love. San is punished with eternal confinement and Liu flees with their infant son, Chen Xiang, swearing to avenge his wife.

Time passes and Chen Xiang grows into a pouty, angry teenaged boy. Once Lin Dai bounds on screen, looking like the exact opposite of a pouty, teenaged boy, the inappropriateness of this casting becomes clear. Whatever Lin’s reason for forcing Ling Po out of the film—jealousy over Ling Po’s rising popularity, insecurity in her own star power, fear that her age (almost 30) would force her from the spotlight or a desire to try a cross-dressing haungmei role that were currently all the rage—the decision was a poor one.

From this moment on, The Lotus Lamp stops being a slight, if enjoyable haungmei opera and mutates into the archetypical train wreck, made all the more awful by its star’s imminent suicide. If Linda Lin Dai had made another thirty films after The Lotus Lamp, the film would simply be seen as one of her lesser efforts. Instead, it is haunted by its casting and suffers all the more for it.

*I’ve seen sources claim she was working on two, three or four films at the time of her death.

The Lotus Lamp
Dir: Yue Feng
Released: July 8, 1965

Inside The Forbidden City

Chinese justice, at least in the historical films of Shaw Brothers, is not built on the ideal of “Innocent until proven guilty.” Judges roam the countryside, hearing accusations and passing judgment before the victim ever gets a chance to speak. Presenting a defense is less about arguing reasonable doubt than it is about surviving the increasingly painful tortures the judge metes out, trying to wring a confession from the accused by any means necessary.

Inside The Forbidden City, a typically lush and melodramatic haungmei (yellow plum) opera, presents absolutist judicial prudence as both a monster and a savior, and it’s illuminating to examine which judges are hailed and which are condemned.

Two of the emperor’s concubines are struggling, as concubines are wont to do, for their lover’s favor. Li Zheng Fei, the nice concubine, is pregnant with the Emperor’s first-born son—few things win more favor than producing an heir. Liu (Kao Pao-shu), the mean concubine, fakes pregnancy for a while but must eventually knock Li Zheng Fei from the top of the heap.

Replacing Li’s son with a shaved cat, calling the offspring a supernatural “gnome” and claiming that still-unconscious Li is cursed certainly does the trick. Without a second thought, the emperor passes judgment and banishes Li to the forbidden palace, a cold pile of stone on the outskirts of the emperor’s city.

With her rival banished and the heir dead, Liu can relax with her eunuch co-conspirator and receive the emperor’s lavish attentions. But there’s still that pesky matter of producing an new heir. Unbeknownst to Liu, Li’s son is still alive, thanks to the efforts of maid Kho Zhu (Ivy Ling Po), a friendly eunuch and a goddess. Liu finds the son, adopts him as her own and secures her future as the mother of the emperor-to-be.

Years later, honorable judge Bao Zhen (Chin Feng) hears the entire sorry tale and takes the case directly to the new emperor (i.e., Li’s son), accusing him and his ersatz mother of un-filial behavior. Even the most powerful of judges would have a difficult time accusing the emperor of anything, much less a crime as serious un-filial behavior; but Bao, through a very clever and cinematic ruse, brings the true criminals to justice.

As is typical of Shaw’s mythical approach to Chinese history, absolutist government, which can be manipulated by one or two corrupt officials, is castigated in Forbidden City. Shaw’s continual disparagement of fictional eunuchs isn’t so much a paean to democracy as it is a jab at communist China, politics that helped Shaw Brothers sell their films in Hong Kong, Taiwan and other centers of the Chinese diaspora.

But Shaw studios obviously loved a little bit of absolutism; their studio was built on iron clad contracts, top-down management and unquestioned loyalty to Run Run Shaw. Judge Bao wields his total power without regret, meting out rough justice to all wrong doers; and for this, the movie heralds him. Imperial rule is rarely a good thing in the Shaw universe, but absolute meritocracy usually receives a rousing cheer of support.

Although Forbidden City is classified as a haungmei opera, and shares many of the genre’s traits, it’s quite unlike Shaw’s other entries into the yellow plum canon. Less bright and garish, the film lives in the darker dwellings of justice and revenge. The difference in tone is unsurprising considering the script was written by Chang Cheh, one of his last script jobs before becoming a famous director.

Not based, as far as I can tell, on an established opera or well-worn tale, Forbidden City is free to try out music and stories that would have been unthinkable in adaptation of loved classics like Love Eterne. The result is a opera that is not bound by convention, a change as refreshing as an honest judge amongst a sea of corrupt eunuchs.

Inside The Forbidden City
Dir: Kao Li
Released: October 16, 1965

The West Chamber

Hollywood suffers from many critiques; most common among them, “Hollywood has no new ideas.” But Hollywood’s prodigious recycling can’t compare to China’s reuse of its literary classics. By 1965, when Shaw Brothers studios added The West Chamber to its 1960’s tidal wave of huangmei operas, versions of the tale had been filmed 7 times in 30 years. That’s a average of a West Chamber every 4 years.

These quadrennial editions of the well known opera probably varied little (it’s hard to say since most of them no longer exist), each telling the same story of the scholar Zhang Jun Rui (Ivy Ling Po in the male role) smitten after a brief glimpse of Cui Ying Ying (Fang Ying), the prime minister’s daughter.

When Ying Ying is threatened by bandits, her mother promises Ying Ying’s hand in marriage to the man who rescues the Cui family’s honor. Jun Rui saves the day, but his celebrations turn to ash when mother Cui reneges. The two lovers, separated by a towering monastery wall, keep in touch thanks to the persistence of Ying Ying’s maid, Hong Niang (Li Ching).

Niang has to take the initiative because Ying Ying has to be the most indecisive, shy and unlikable character in the haungmei canon. This is largely due to Fang Ying’s performance. With the exception of Ivy Ling Po, who was a certified box office sensation after The Love Eterne, the talent in West Chamber was mostly young and inexperienced. Fang’s unfamiliarity with acting is probably why she never decides if her character is painfully shy, dumber than straw or a skilled manipulator; instead of picking one approach, Fang frequently tries all three approaches in the same scene.

When Niang tries subterfuge to bring the lovers together, Ying Ying appears to play along with the clandestine meeting—until she tries to call the guards on an understandably surprised Jun Rui. Shyness is understandable, especially for the kind of archetypal classical beauty Shaw Brothers tried to construct in these films, but Ying Ying goes beyond shy and becomes numbingly stupid, claiming that never agreed to the meeting. But Fang Ying never abandons the self-aware glint in her eyes that suggest she’s playing with everyone around her, which makes her unlikable instead of ignorant.

Later, Jun Rui sickens and the lovers are split, I expected the tragedy typical of Shaw’s huangmei films to appear. Separated lovers, unnamed illnesses, poems filled with the angst of lost happiness—the stage was set for at least one death, maybe two. When that tragedy failed to appear, I felt almost ripped off. How dare Shaws deliver an opera without a tragic ending?!

The tragedy-free plot of romantic miscommunication featuring a quick-witted maid reminded me of The Bride Napping; but the films are of very different calibers. Where Bride gives us the fantastic Betty Loh Tih in the maid’s role, witty romantic comedy and original songs, West Chamber offers up the featureless Li Ching, a tone that waivers uncertainly and the same haungmei tunes we’ve heard a dozen times before. But, considering the frequency of West Chamber productions, I doubt that Shaw’s intention was to create an original musical. Like many of Shaw’s productions, their musicals in particular, West Chamber was designed to deliver the familiar.

The West Chamber
Dir: Yue Feng
Released: November 11, 1965

Temple of the Red Lotus

The pieces were there, someone just needed to pick them up. Swordfights, revenge, mystical kung fu power; these were woven into the cultural fabric of Hong Kong through adventure novels, classical myth, song and theater. Wuxia pian, or stories of chivalrous swordplay, was a popular genre even in the earliest days of Hong Kong film production.

But, as tastes waxed and waned, the wuxia pian film had fallen out of favor. Shaw built their Hong Kong studio not with wuxia, but with romance. And as long as romance continued to fill seats there was no reason to shake things up.

In the early 60s, this began to change. And, as I’ve noted in my reviews of the films before Temple, there was a growing presence of male violence and revenge. I’m not sure of the reasons; perhaps audiences were growing bored with romance. Perhaps imports of the classic samurai films of the early 60s sparked an interest in tales of bloody revenge. Maybe both. Regardless, in 1965 director Chui Chang Wang picked up the neglected pieces of the wuxia genre and fed them through the machine of Shaw style.

The results, at best, are rough.  The opening battle, filmed at about 15 frames per second, compared to the normal 24, propels the actors like they were pumped full of crank. The plot careens from north to south, introducing new characters minutes before the finale and ending in the middle of the story. (Two sequels, The Twin Swords and The Sword and the Lute, probably tied up these loose ends). But the film was popular enough to lead to other wuxia films, like Come Drink With Me, that would start to smooth the jagged edges.

Rough or not, the pieces are there: the young man (Wang Yu in his first released film) looking to avenge his family; a new, powerful sword fighting technique; inter-clan battles; political machinations and mystery evolve here as Wu tries to figure out who is the villain: the Li family that he’s just married into or the mysterious Red Temple Clan.

But mixed amongst these rediscovered pieces of wuxia are elements that had been Shaw stalwarts for almost 10 years, issues of motherhood and a woman’s filial and marital obligations. Most of the battles are not won or lost through fighting skill, but through family bonds and love. Temple Of The Red Lotus is an evolution, not a quantum leap, and any new pieces had to spring from what had come before.

Temple Of The Red Lotus
Released: October 1, 1965
Dir: Hsu Tseng-hung

Vermilion Door

Within the first 10 minutes, the end of the film is clear. Or, if not exactly clear, it’s limited to one of two options. This is a tragedy, a doomed romance, a weepie. Guessing that a character will die—painfully—is easy. Guessing which character, however, requires the flip of a coin.

But, then, no one went to see Oedipus Rex expecting to be surprised by the ending; similarly, Hong Kong audiences of the 1960s knew the story of Vermilion Door long before the film’s release. Like many Shaw plots, the story was a perennial favorite that had been produced many times before. Tragedies, for some masochistic reason, work exactly because the ending is so predictable. There are no surprises and those who think otherwise probably watch the Zapruder film expecting JFK to duck.*

If she were still alive, Linda Lin Dai would likely have starred as Luo Xiangyi, whose buckets of tears and refined resignation to tragedy cries out for Dai’s presence. If she had been in the film, Shaw would have achieved dream casting. Not only would Dai have reunited with Kwan Shan from Love Without End, she would have appeared with rising star Ivy Ling Po.

But that was not to be and another popular Shaw actress, Li Lihua stars as the doomed Luo, an opera performer in the 1920s who, although engaged to fellow thespian Chiu Hai-Tang, catches the attention of warlord Ruan Shaowen, sealing the lovers’ tragic fate.

With the ending almost resolved, the film still manages to fill the middle 100 minutes with a number of surprises. Ruan, ostensibly the film’s villain, is superseded by his henchman Ji (Lee Wan Chung, who would go on to play a string of memorably slimy lackeys, most notably Smiling Tiger in Come Drink With Me), who is just as quickly bushwacked. And the film, unlike earlier Shaw female-focused tragedies like Love Without End, abruptly switches from the woman’s point of view to the man’s about halfway through the film, resulting in an almost two-part story that provides double the tragic fun!

Ivy Ling Po, not playing a man for once, provides some fine operatic moments. She was one of the few Shaw performers whose singing was not dubbed by famous performers, and the difference is unmistakable. Her songs are rawer and more in character than the dubs.

Yes it’s overwrought, manipulative and excessively tragic. But what you expect? It’s a weepie. But, even if there’s no mystery about the ending, Vermilion Door can still surprise; unless you’ve already memorized the story, in which case being surprised doesn’t matter.

Vermilion Door
Released: August 26, 1965
Dir: Law Chun
HKMdb

*Apologies to Built To Spill.