Yang Kwei Fei

One of my main goals in writing about the Shaw Brothers films is to talk about why they made the films they made. To me this is more interesting than talking in the typical platitudes of the film critic — “A thrill a minute! Two ears up! Etc”. Because of this I love watching Shaw’s adaptations of classic Chinese literature. Of the common Shaw Brothers genres none do a better job of illuminating the ideological engines that drove the studio’s output.

Audience familiarity with the source material was a big bonus for Shaw Brothers; just like today, most audiences are more willing to watch known quantities than unfamiliar stories. So Shaw Brothers frequently adapted novels, poems and pulp serials to the big screen. Few sources would have been more familiar to audiences than the classics, stories that had been memorized and retold for centuries.

And the classics had the advantage of flexibility; when Shaw Brothers adapted popular modern novels they probably had much less freedom when adapting the story to suit their tastes. After all, the studio expected that most of their audience had read, or heard about, the novel. Thus the film needed to deliver what people expected.

But with classical stories these restrictions mostly disappeared. While the stories were well known their descent through the oral tradition resulted in many different, conflicting versions. Like languages, these stories had evolved into an array of dialects.

Take the story of Yang Kwei Fei. If you google the name right now, the top results will contain at least three different versions of her story. These stories will mostly agree on the historical particulars — her name, who she married, how she died — but will disagree on almost everything else.

To Shaw bosses, this divergence was perfect. Since there was no single story to adhere to, the films could deliver characters that everyone knew, while the studio could still adjust the story to meet their needs — be those needs marketing, moral or cultural.

And the most important need of Yang Kwei Fei was that its star, Li Li-hua, look good. So the morally conflicting story of China’s great beauty, a woman who nurtured and loved the man that overthrew a dynasty, thus causing her own death, becomes an oddly disjointed glamour film about the tragic, tearful scapegoat of a nation.

In the early 1960s, when Hong Kong films featured and were made for women, it would have been hard to portray Yang Kwei Fei, or Li Li-hua, in an completely unflattering light; although Yang starts the film as a cruel and jealous concubine, she quickly and mysteriously softens by the film’s halfway point.

Yang’s character development isn’t helped by the film’s extreme brevity. At just over an hour long the film feels like it’s missing its entire middle act. In order to get to the tearful ending, it was probably just easier to skip over the parts of the story where Yang behaved less glamorously.

And, in the end, this film is really all about glamour. Director Li Han-hsiang features Li Li-hua in every way possible, surrounding her face with appropriately lush backdrops; Yang is Li’s film, from her steamy introduction, to her tearful end — and there’s no way that she would be shown in anything but the most positive light.

Yang Kwei Fei (sometimes called The Magnificent Concubine)
Dir: Li Han-hsiang
Released: May 31, 1962