Exploring the ephemeral past of Chinese entertainment from Hong Kong, the U.S.A., and around the world: vaudeville pioneers, flappers, aviatrices, burlesque dancers, hula hoopers, movie queens, sex bombs, jade girls, tomboys, pin-ups, sour beauties, girl jocks, swordswomen, and go-go girls.
I couldn't resist these two stylish young ladies, whose photos are currently going for auction on eBay right now.
The first is Lee Bo Ying (李寶瑩), a Cantonese opera singer who made some 40 films between 1954 and 1965. She was dubbed "Little Fong Yim Fun" (小芳艷芬) after renowned "Queen of Cantonese Opera" Fong Yim Fun. This YouTube clip shows Lee singing "Sorrows of the Autumn Boudoir" from her film debut, It's Fun Getting Together (1954).
And this is Fong Tsin Ying (方靜音), who also had a diminutive nickname: "Little Chang Loo" (小張露). Like Chang Loo, Fong was known for her vivacious singing and stage presence. Sadly, her life was cut short in 1959 by a deadly traffic accident. Check out her fabulous version of Georgia Gibb's 1955 hit "Kiss Me Another".
Earlier this year I was bemoaning the fact that there were many titles from Celestial Picture's acquisition of the Shaw Brothers film library that still remained unavailable on DVD. Well, imagine my excitement when I discovered today (via the ever reliable Roast Pork Sliced from a Rusty Cleaver) that all 15 of the missing films I had mentioned — and many more — are now available in HD format, preloaded on a digital player.
Singapore multimedia company Creative has released the ZiiEagle Movie Box (天鹰宝盒), which contains a "complete" (I'll explain the quotation marks later) collection of 668 Shaw Brothers films, among which are a good many that never made it to DVD. I haven't yet done a complete count of the previously unreleased titles (although it's definitely not "around 200" as cited in this article). What I can tell you is that there are a good two dozen that I'd love to see, such as Poison Rose (1966), pictured above. Conspicuously absent from the collection, however, is Operation Lipstick (1967) and The Brain-Stealers (1968), two spy thrillers by Inoue Umetsugu starring, respectively, Cheng Pei-pei and Lily Ho. (Is that because there are plans to release those titles on DVD?)
The ZiiEagle is priced at S$1,070 (US$813) but is currently selling on promotion for S$888 (US$675). I'm not going to lie — that's a lot of dough. But considering how much I've spent on Shaw DVDs over the past eight years, I'd exchange in a flash all of my DVDs for this handsome little box. It's a moot point for me, however, since the ZiiEagle cannot be ordered outside of Singapore. Nonetheless, I'm quite excited about the arrival of this product, because it gives me hope that I may yet see these "no longer missing" (in Singapore, at least) Shaw films.
Of course, there still remain the truly missing titles: Shaw's black-and-white films (melodramas and comedies mostly) from the late 50s and early 60s and the entirety of the studio's Cantonese productions. Speaking of which, next month the Hong Kong Film Archive will be hosting a rare screening of Sweet Girl in Terror (1958), starring the "Jewel of Shaw", Patricia Lam Fung. This seminal movie is just one of the many treasures you won't find in the ZiiEagle Movie Box.
Still, if Santa could smuggle a ZiiEagle out of Singapore for me, it would make this Shaw fan *very* happy.
Currently up for auction on eBay is this fabulous portrait by Armando Drechsler of Anna May Wong as the controversial "Mother of Modern Mexico", La Malinche. It's not as odd as first seems. During her early career, Anna May played a variety of "exotic" ethnicities besides her own: for example, the Arab girl Zira in The 40th Door (1924) and the Inuit girl Keok in The Alaskan (1924). Such ethnic transformations were commonplace in Hollywood at the time, not to mention the institutionalized practice of yellowface.
Drechsler's choice of Anna May Wong as his model for La Malinche is especially provocative because many of the charges leveled against La Malinche — even still today — were also leveled against Anna May: harlot, race traitor, miscegenist.
But it seems plausible to me that Drechsler, who was originally from Germany and likely familiar with Anna May's European sojourns, instead regarded both women as boundary-crossing pioneers.
Whatever the inspiration, with this painting he created a stunning testament to Anna May Wong's global appeal and world-class beauty.
* For more examples of Armando Drechsler's work, see Mexican Calendar Girls by Angela Villalba.
There is one song inextricably associated with Lin Dai — played so often that you either weep with sympathy or grimace in pain — and that song is Carrie Ku Mei's evergreen hit "Love without End" from the 1961 movie of the same name. Carrie wasn't the only singer who provided the vocals for Lin Dai in her films. Tsin Ting famously sang for Linda in the huang mei opera films Diau Charn (1958) and The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959).
It may come as a surprise then, as it did to me a few years ago, that Lin Dai was herself a singer of great note, if not great skill, and was a popular Pathé recording artist during the 1950s. However, as my buddy Dev Yang has written on his blog The Golden Age of Chinese Language Cinema, although Linda's singing lacks skill and sophistication, there is a genuine sincerity that is quite endearing.
Linda did not sing the songs in her debut film, Singing under the Moon (1953), however, in an odd turn of events, she ended up recording them for Pathé. The albums were a big hit. In fact, Linda's version of the song "The Hot Blazing Sun" broke record sales set by renowned professional singers such as Yao Lee and Chang Loo.
Keen to continue Linda's success as a songstress, her mentor and lover Yan Jun made sure to include songs in the subsequent films they made together. Her second movie Humiliation for Sale (released in Singapore in 1954 but not in Hong Kong until 1958) included three songs. And her third, Spring Is in the Air (1954), incorporated the plot device of students preparing for a musical. It was a device that would be recycled in her later films, such as Merry-Go-Round (1956), a color extravaganza shot in Japan that includes a whopping ten songs and fantasy musical sequences with the all-girl Shochiku Revue.
While Spring Is in the Air is apparently unavailable (not even on YouTube), we can at least still hum along with the songs from the film, such as this delightful number, "Lovely Springtime". ((LISTEN))
The innocent Lin Dai we hear in this song would eventually lose her voice during her intensive commodification at Shaw Brothers — as they strove to create the ultimate and perfect movie queen.
Call me unsophisticated, but I'll take the thin-voiced Lin Dai of Spring Is in the Air over the ventriloquized Lin Dai of Love without End any day of the week!
* A very special thanks to Gilbert Jong for providing the above image from the movie booklet for Spring Is in the Air. Check out his fabulous collection of Lin Dai photos at his Flickr stream Enjoy Yourself Tonight.
References
The Age of Shanghainese Pops (2001) by Wong Kee Chee
Here's a cheeky photo of Linda and Grace Chang courtesy of Oldflames (who happens to be a big Lin Dai fan). Linda looks like she's playing big sister, but in fact she was one and a half years younger than Grace. Cheeky, indeed!
Don't forget that Lin Dai week continues at Glenn's blog A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed with his reviews of Love Without End (1961) and Madam White Snake (1962).
Four months after her suicide on July 17, 1964, Shaw Brothers released Beyond the Great Wall, Lin Dai's final collaboration with director Li Han-hsiang. Production on the film had actually begun as early as 1960 (see the February issue of Southern Screen) and by the end of the year an advertising poster had even appeared on the back of Southern Screen (November), but because of interruptions from other Shaw productions, Beyond the Great Wall took a long time to complete and wasn't publicly shown until November 1964. By that time, Linda was dead and Li had already left Shaw to establish his own film company in Taiwan. It was eleven years earlier that the both of them had made their respective debuts as actress and director with Singing under the Moon (1953).
In 1951 Linda — just 16 years old — was discovered and offered a contract by Yuen Yang-an, co-founder of the progressive film company Great Wall. Unfortunately, she soon found herself in the midst of the political divide afflicting Hong Kong's movie industry. When it became known that Linda's father had been a big player in the recently defeated Nationalist government, she was blacklisted by Great Wall's communist faction. Although she was already estranged from her father (Linda's parents had divorced when she was a child), she was compelled to write a confession denouncing him. Even so, the studio's directors were still afraid to offer her a role in their films. When Linda subsequently refused to renew her contract, the hardliners threatened her with a large debt, citing the money already spent on her wardrobe and publicity photographs. She protested by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Linda was discovered in time, and ironically her attempted suicide might have helped catapult her to stardom. Her name was splashed all over the papers and magazines, alerting the public and the government to the revolutionary activism breeding in Hong Kong's film studios.
As a result of this incident, nearly a dozen leftist film workers were expelled from the colony in January 1952 and Linda was released from her obligation to the studio, as was fellow Great Wall star Yan Jun, who had recently begun an affair with her.
Yan Jun was determined to make Linda a star, and when he joined the Yung Hwa film company later that year he insisted on bringing her with him. Their first collaboration — and Linda's screen debut — was Singing under the Moon (1953), an adaptation of Shen Congwen's novel Border Town, a tragic coming-of-age story about an orphaned teenage girl and her elderly grandfather. Linda stars as the main character Cui Cui and Yan Jun plays dual roles as the grandfather and the younger of two brothers who both fall in love with her.
Although Yan Jun was ostensibly the director of the film, the novice screenwriter Li Han-hsiang, who had been hired as deputy director, ended up directing the film because Yan was so busy in front of the camera. In this way, Singing under the Moon also became Li's debut. The film proved to be a huge success and launched the career of one of Hong Kong's greatest actresses as well as one of its greatest directors.
Although Singing under the Moon is cited as no longer available by the Hong Kong Film Archive in the notes for their 2009 retrospective (The Legend & The Beauty — The Films of Lin Dai), clips from the film have miraculously shown up on YouTube, affording us a rare glimpse of the humble beginnings of Hong Kong's movie queen. Linda's performance in the scene below shows that her popularity was due not only to her natural charm but also to Chinese audiences' perennial love for the sassy girl-next-door type. Hopefully we will one day be able to see the entire film in a manner befitting its landmark status.
References
An Age of Idealism: Great Wall & Feng Huang Days (2001) by Hong Kong Film Archive
The Age of Shanghainese Pops (2001) by Wong Kee Chee
Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Twentieth Century (2003) by Lily Xiao Hong Lee
Li Han-hsiang, Storyteller (2007) by Hong Kong Film Archive
Here's un petit apéritif before I publish my post about Lin Dai's first film, Singing under the Moon (1953). I found this unique magazine cover while searching through my eBay archive for Lin Dai materials. This issue appeared on newsstands shortly before Linda made her silver screen debut. Very cool, don't you think? Not quite what you'd expect, especially during the beginning of her career, a period of which she is usually remembered as a pig-tailed village lass not a short-haired urban tomboy. It just goes to show that the legend of Lin Dai that's been passed down to us is an incomplete picture, even more so when we consider that the first half of her movie output is currently unavailable on home video. It's my hope that this week's exploration of Lin Dai's early films will broaden the perception of modern fans about Hong Kong's beloved movie queen.
Meanwhile, Glenn over at A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed has just posted his review of Beyond the Great Wall (1964).
Lin Dai and Soo Fung showing off for International Screen (October 1956)
I can't think of a more perfect picture to announce that starting tomorrow my blog buddy Glenn (A Pessimist Is Never Disappointed) and I will be celebrating the films of Hong Kong movie queen Lin Dai.
Glenn will review Beyond the Great Wall (1960/64), Love without End (1961), Madam White Snake (1962), The Love Parade (1963), and The Last Woman of Shang (1964) — all thankfully available on DVD. As for me, I'll be blogging about some of her early films that are either lost or languishing in home video limbo.
To bring you up to speed, check out Glenn's previous Lin Dai reviews: Diau Charn (1958), which garnered Linda her second Best Actress award at the 5th Asian Film Festival; Les Belles (1961), for which she received — not without some controversy — her third Best Actress award; and The Lotus Lamp (1965), posthumously completed with a stand-in and released a year after her suicide.
Whether you adore her or consider her overrated, Lin Dai is unquestionably a great actress and one of the top icons of Chinese cinema.
Well, it's that time of the year again. Let me take a moment to offer a few special gift suggestions that can't be found at your local Walmart — or even Amazon for that matter.
This new DVD box set from Arthur Dong is a must-have for those of you interested in the rich history of Chinese American performers. The set includes a special 2-disc edition of his most recent documentary, Hollywood Chinese (2007), which won Best Documentary at the Golden Horse Awards. It also includes A Toisan Trilogy, comprising three of his early short films. Last and definitely not least is the hard-to-find Forbidden City U.S.A. (1989), an entertaining and groundbreaking work of scholarship that is a major inspiration for this blog. At $98.95, the set is not cheap, but believe me — it's worth every penny. Perhaps the most compelling reason to buy this collection is to get your hands on one of the few remaining copies of Forbidden City, which will soon be out of print and unlikely reissued because of expiring music rights. This is the last chance for individuals to acquire the DVD (which is now only available as a single disc to institutional buyers). You — or the ones who love you — can order the set here. Free holiday shipping is available until December 13th. Don't miss this window of opportunity. Regrets are no fun.
Vous ne parlez pas français? That's no excuse not to buy this book. Only 22 euros (18 if you pre-order before December 13th), the 148-page Les actrices chinoises is bursting at the binding with gorgeous portraits of Chinese film stars, from Ruan Lingyu to Gong Li. It includes rare photographs from the films of Wong Kar-wai and the personal collection of Paul Fonoroff, as well as a few choice pieces from yours truly. Click here for detailed information in English about Les actrices chinoises and how to order it. To see a slideshow of some of the images from the book, check out the original page. I can't wait for my copy!
There's nothing cooler than a cool t-shirt. Best of all is a cool Hong Kong movie t-shirt, which is exactly what you'll find at Shelf Life Clothing. Their truly unique designs are guaranteed to please even the most jaded of HK cinephiles (may I recommend the Category III shirt).
Coming soon and available for pre-order is the hilarious Gambling Vampire shirt. A mash-up of God of Gamblers and Mr. Vampire, this design epitomizes what some of us love most about Hong Kong cinema. Is it too much to hope that Wong Jing will see this shirt and steal the concept for his next movie?!
