Shaw Brothers

The Comedy of Mismatches

Don’t let the title fool you, A Comedy Of Mismatches is not what you expect. Remember when you read Shakespeare in high school and couldn’t figure out why the plays weren’t funny? Then the teacher explained that in Shakespeare’s time ‘comedy’ meant a play in which everyone got married, not a play in which Ben Stiller got kicked in the testicles.

There’s absolutely no testicle kicking in A Comedy Of Mismatches, but there is a lot of marrying and a lot of confused couples. After a chance meeting in a temple, two couples exchange tokens of affection. Unnerved by their screaming parents, the couples muff the hand-off — each girl gets the wrong boy’s fan and each boy gets the wrong girl’s hanky.

And since the tokens are monogrammed, each lover ends up with the wrong name. This would not be a problem, if the boys didn’t immediately arrange to marry the women they thought they met — hence the mismatches. Instead of being engaged to true love Liu Weiliang (Pat Ting Hung), the scholar Sun Yulang (Chin Feng) is actually engaged to a woman whose hanky he got by mistake.

Shenanigans with a third couple, who are mostly kept in the background, lead to the marriage of the Sun and Liu anyway. But thanks to a set of baroque coincides that only happen in romantic comedies, Sun is dressed up as a woman and Liu is wearing the groom’s robe.

While all these miscommunications and wacky situations could develop into comedy, they never quite do. Instead of pushing humor, A Comedy Of Mismatches sticks to romance. And even that never really fills out, thanks to the shapelessness of the characters. Beyond Liu’s desire for a good match, and Sun’s goofy humor, we never learn much about the couple or what they see in each other.

Instead of characterization, the film spends its final 10 minutes recapping in painful detail exactly what happened in the previous eighty minutes. Just in case it was unclear, I guess.

With a little more wit, or some development of its numerous couples, A Comedy Of Mismatches would be more memorable. Instead, I used it a cheap way to mention kicking Ben Stiller in the testicles.

The Comedy of Mismatches
Dir: Hsieh Chun, Law Chun
Released: May 14, 1964

The Female Prince

A cloistered woman denied true love by status-hungry parents? Yes. A man wrongly accused of a crime? It’s in there. Wait, isn’t this the same story as The Crimson Palm, a film that came out just six weeks before The Female Prince?

For about 20 minutes, it seemed that the Shaw studio was simply going to recycle the exact same story — again — and wait for the haungmei-hungry audiences to pay to see Ivy Ling Po cry her way through a grim tragedy — again.

Thankfully, The Female Prince instead of diving deeper and deeper into tragedy escalates this plot into an entertaining farce. Every time things look bleak for our heroines, Qin Feng Xiao (Ivy Ling Po), and her maid, Chun Lan (Li Ching), they simply lie cheat and charm their way out of the hangman’s noose, smiling all the while.

And with each lie, the pair find themselves in a more improbable situation and celebrating an other unlikely success — quickly followed by a new life-threatening crisis. The more Feng Xiao lies, and the more she rebels against the gender roles that have held her back, the brighter Ivy Ling Po shines. I’ve always enjoyed Ling Po’s comedic work more than her weepie work in films like The Crimson Palm — and The Female Prince gives full rein to her mischievous skills.

Ling Po’s undeniable charm is also the film’s most curious aspect. The Female Prince was the second of two haungmei films made by director Chow Sze-Loke and scriptwriter Chang Cheh. Chow came from the world of Cantonese filmmaking, where he worked in a huge variety of genres. Chang Cheh, not yet a famous director, had just joined Shaw Brothers as a screenwriter. His first film for Shaws, The Amorous Lotus Pan was a bold break from the female-focused films that Shaw Brothers had been making; instead of sympathizing with the female lead, Chang vilifies her and champions her revenge-hungry brother-in-law Wu Song.

But in The Female Prince, clever women are put center stage, bamboozling the bumbling men that threaten them with loveless marriages — very much a return to the traditional Shaw story that Chang railed against in his film critiques. Did Chang want to show Shaw that he could write a film in their style, or did the Shaw management ask him to tone down the blood? Maybe Chang just wanted to be faithful to the story’s operatic source. Regardless of the why, comparing the films provides an intriguing contrast between the Shaw styles of the early 60s and the style that would emerge in the late 60s — and this one’s fun to watch, to boot.

The Female Prince
Dir: Chow Sze-Loke
Released: December 10, 1964

The Dancing Millionairess

Can a film honestly be called a musical if it contains no signing for the first ninety-percent of the movie? What if it also contains almost no dancing? Maybe defining a musical more a question of style instead of content.

For 97 minutes of its 109 minute running time, no one sings in The Dancing Millionairess. And the film’s first dance routine isn’t until minute 45 (yes, I kept track). And while the movie ends with a celebration of singing and dancing, the film still feels pretty barren when it comes to musical numbers.

But yet The Dancing Millionairess still feels like a musical, even in its talkiest moments. The tone is light, the pace bouncy, the colors bright and the stars polished. It’s got everything a musical needs — except for the singing.

One of the tricks to making a musical, at least a musical in the Hollywood style, is to create a world in which people breaking into song is not abnormal. For example, the highly artificial set-design used in classic Gene Kelly films helped to create a sense of other-worldliness that helped make the singing more normal. West Side Story opens with a perception-changing top-down view of Manhattan, in the hopes that singing gang-members will seem less bizarre.

Perhaps after watching tons of MGM musicals, I’ve come to associate their visual aesthetic with the musical genre. So any film that apes this style, which The Dancing Millionairess frequently does, becomes a musical in my mind — even if there’s almost no signing.

And so Doe Chin recreates the successful style he used in the earlier, more musical musical Les Belles, dropping most of the singing in favor of poetic narration and replacing complicated dance routines with light, poppish boogieing — leaving much of the movie’s charm in the hands of real-life couple Peter Chen Ho and Betty Loh Tih.

The pair does well, especially once they are allowed to unite on-screen — a gratification that is delayed far too long. The film’s highlights are their scenes of content relaxation.

Sadly, those scenes are few. Most of the film is muddled by an exceedingly complex romantic-comedy plot that I could not explain even if wanted to. All that really matters is that there’s a dance troupe that wants to put on a show and corporate president Betty Loh Tih has the money they need — cue the misunderstandings, cute meetings and jaunty music.

Although The Dancing Millionairess ends on a crowd-pleasing high, there’s not much positive to say about the preceding 90 minutes. The film never really hits a comedic stride; instead it just bumbles along until its stars can finally share the screen. Musical or not, the film is far from Shaw’s, or Doe Chin’s, best.

The Dancing Millionairess
Dir: Doe Chin
Released: February 12, 1964

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

Apartment For Ladies

Thanks to movies like Apartment for Ladies, I now know how women spend their time when men are not around. Let me share my new found knowledge.

• 50% of their time is spent parading around in their underwear
• 30% is spent in catfights
• 10% is spent using their sexuality to swindle stupid men
• 10% is spent attacking men who steal their underwear

That’s pretty much it. The secret life of women in a nutshell.

Inoue Umetsugu showcased Shaw’s female stars in a way that no other director did—he made them glamorous, clever, powerful and sexy. But, in films like Apartment For Ladies he also pigeonholed and mocked them. What do the heroines do when taking revenge on a couple of swindlers and rapists? Bump them with their hips and tickle them.

While Inoue’s gender comedies are all in the spirit of good fun, they become exasperating during moments like these. Apartment for Ladies' ensemble cast includes several generations of female stars—Ouyang Shafei, Teresa Ha Ping, Lily Li and Betty Ting Pei. With all this experience and star power, tickling is the best they can do?

It might be unfair to attack a comedy for a scene it plays for laughs, but the tickling is just a symptom of a larger problem. Where Inoue once made films that showcased women (such as Hong Kong Nocturne), in Apartment For Ladies he instead showcases stereotypes. It’s much less satisfying.

Apartment For Ladies
Dir: Inoue Umetsugu
Released: November 20, 1970

A Time For Love

Another madcap ‘comedy’ replete with singing, brief nudity and largely unwatchable zaniness. Honestly, when the comic highlight of a film is a sexually aggressive robot, there’s not much to laugh at.

On the plus side, the film does have some moments of fine satire, especially in the opening scenes when the servants of the rich Old Lau sing about how great it is to rob the old man blind. And Lily Ho as Pearl, the servant’s daughter who falls for the Lau scion, shows some decent comedic instincts.

While A Time For Love is slightly better than its predecessor, Guess Who Killed My 12 Lovers, it still runs out of steam about 45 minutes into its 90 minute length. By the time the film introduces the rapist robot, it’s clear that they are stretching for anything to keep the movie moving. It succeeds, if only because it’s so jaw-droppingly mind-boggling.

A Time For Love
Dir: Kuei Chi-Hung
Released: November 16, 1970

Guess Who Killed My 12 Lovers?

During the 1960s, Shaw Brothers transformed from a Female-oriented film studio to a Male-oriented one. The romances and operas that began the decade gave way to swordplay, spy films and war dramas.

Tho sole holdout genre from Shaw’s more feminine days was the wenyi drama — weepy romances usually adapted from novels. But as the 60s came to a close, so did the wenyi drama.

Never one to abandon an audience, the studio tried other ways to bring women to the theater. But instead of appealing to the older women that flocked to wenyi and haungmei opera, Shaw targeted teenage girls with pop musicals like Guess Who Killed My 12 Lovers.

The quality of Guess Who and other teen girl films from the early 70s indicate that Shaw didn’t put a very high priority on these films. Put simply, these films are horrible. With about 15 minutes worth of plot, Guess Who pads itself out to 90 minutes with songs that recap the silk-thin plot, and bizarre digressions.

But as long as the films brought audiences into Shaw-owned movie theaters, I doubt the studio cared that much about the movie’s quality.

Poor Jenny Hu, a star that Shaw Brothers never figured out how to sell, sings and smiles her way through Guess Who, looking only mildly embarrassed to be stuck in an orange bathing suit for most of the movie. It should not come as a surprise that Guess Who was her last film with Shaw Brothers.

Guess Who Killed My 12 Lovers?
Dir: Wu Chia Hsang
Released: September 11, 1970

The Three Smiles

It’s fitting that Shaw Brothers wrapped up the 1960s with the last major haungmei film they would ever make (the genre made a one-film comeback in 1977). No other genre summarizes the 60s Shaw style — light, stylish, pretty and romantic — than the yellow plum opera.

In the early 60s, as Shaw battled MP & GI, it was the haungmei films, and the luscious widescreen Shaw Scope, that set Shaw Brothers apart. Later, when the opera craze cooled and the nostalgia for old styles had faded, the same techniques that powered the yellow plum operas were applied to a slew of more modern musicals, spy films and comedies.

By 1969, Shaw Brothers hadn’t released a yellow plum opera since 1966’s The Mirror And The Lichee. I don’t know why the studio chose to make another opera after such a long break — maybe they had their own kind of nostalgia, or perhaps it was the enduring popularity of star Ivy Ling Po — but they approached the project with gusto, casting Ling Po and Li Ching, their two biggest female stars, in the leads and assigning veteran director Yueh Feng to write and direct.

Like its predecessors, Three Smiles is based on a well-known story, and the film does very little to mess with the haungmei formula that had worked so well for so many films — Tang (Ling Po), a supercilious aesthete scholar, falls for the maid Autumn Fragrance (Li Ching) after she smiles at him, you guessed it, three times. To pursue his love, he sells himself into servitude so he can work by her side.

This “Scholar and the Beauty” storyline formed the basis of the majority of haungmei films — indeed, Smiles' plot is almost an exact copy of 1967’s Pearl Phoenix — but Smiles adds a ton of subplots (idiot brothers, a coquettish maid, a jealous cousin, a singing boatman) to lessen the deja vu and increase the comedy.

The film’s standout moments are its opening scenes, filmed outdoors, when Tang and Autumn Fragrance meet. The wide-open vistas make the film more naturalistic than the usual studio-bound operas; and Yueh tries some new stylistic tricks, adapting the freeze-fame effects he used in Bells Of Death for a lighter genre.

But once Tang enters the Hua household, the film begins to choke on its familiar story and overabundance of sub-plots. It’s never bad, but it certainly doesn’t make a case for the freshness of the haungmei genre. Nostalgia can only carry a genre too far; by 1969, it was time for Shaw Brothers to move on to something new.

The Three Smiles
Dir: Yueh Feng
Released: September 25, 1969

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

Spring Blossoms

Of all the marketing copy written for these Shaw Brothers releases, no sentence has been funnier, or more accurate, than this snippet from the cover of Spring Blossoms:

It’s a triple-decker romantic bus ride on a road to nowhere speeding toward a low bridge.

That pretty much sums up the whole film. Fast, bizarre, out-of-control and hurtling towards disaster. Spring Blossoms only avoids catastrophe by realizing, correctly, that no one cares if a romantic comedy makes any sense, as long as everyone ends up happily married.

Built on the movie law that single people want nothing more than marriage, and that parents want nothing more than for their daughters to marry doctors, Spring Blossoms never makes much sense, but satisfies the marriage quotient with ease.

In the Chen household, the three eldest daughters have married tenants and there’s hope that daughter number four, Jieyu (Shu Pei Pei), will marry their newest tenant, Wu (Yang Fang), a medical student from Singapore.

When Chen’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Zhao (Go Bo Shu), sees the marital possibilities of renting out a room, she immediately rents to Wu’s classmate, the spastic, bumbling lothario Yao (Chin Feng), in the hopes that he’ll woo her daughter, Jinglan (Essie Lin Chia).

The third, and never fully baked, layer of this cake involves Chen’s fifth daughter, Meiyu (Lily Li), and a classmate (whose father is Wu and Yao’s professor) trying to get their parents to marry, Brady Bunch style.

Love, of course, is guaranteed, if not exactly in the order you’d predict. Since attraction is a given, the movie never bothers to explain why these couples fall in love, they simply do, obeying the eternal laws of the screen.

The film fills out its very short running-time with slapstick comedy (It’s remarkable that Yao has lived as long as he has, considering that he chokes on everything he eats) and some polite satire of marriage-obsessed mothers, which allows Go Bo Shu to play her standard role—the unpleasant, scheming mother—to comedic effect.

Spring Blossoms is light enough to lift a dirigible, but it’s still a fun comedy. The bus may be on a ride to nowhere, but at least the passengers entertain.

Spring Blossoms
Dir: Yue Feng
Released: April 19, 1968