Mildred Pierce in Movietown
Revelations from my dissertation
I got a 1:1 on my undergraduate dissertation! I’m not releasing the whole 10,000 words because I’d like to do a restructure and rewrite, and then assess my options for publication. I am releasing a shorter summary with some screencaps and observations of note. Here it is. (Also, scroll to the end for bonus Taiwanese music commentary!!)
I. Basic info about the film I’m studying
II. The premise of my dissertation
III. On studio politics and the family melodrama
IV. (Briefly) on the Shaw-Sirk connection
V. On CinemaScope vs. ShawScope
I. Basic info about the film I’m studying
My dissertation is about a 1967 Mandarin-language remake of Mildred Pierce (1945). The film was made in Hong Kong at the Hollywood-style ‘Movietown’ studio complex, part of Shaw Brothers Studios (henceforth SB).
Naming issues
The Mandarin name of the film is 欲海情魔 (Yu hai qing mo; literally ‘Love Demon in a Sea of Desire’ - same title as the original film when released in Sinophone markets). The official English title of this 1967 remake is Madam Slender Plum, which is meant to be a translation of the Mildred character’s Chinese name (Xiumei or 秀梅 - some artistic licence has been taken here). From here on I’m referring to it as YHQM.
Casting
Mildred Pierce becomes Wang Xiumei (王秀媚), played by established Hong Kong star Diana Chang Chung-wen (张仲文). Chang gained fame in the late 1950s as a fiery lead in historical dramas (guzhuang pian). At the height of her career, she was known as a ‘中国梦露’ (Chinese [Marilyn] Monroe). YHQM was her final film before her marriage and industry retirement at the age of 31.
Her daughter Veda becomes Wang Lilian (王李莲). She is played by new sensation Jenny Hu (胡燕妮), who is only nine years younger than her onscreen mother. Hu is notable for being the first mixed-race (Taiwanese-German) lead actress in the Hong Kong film industry. Usually her characters have one absent, white parent - this isn’t the case here.
Mildred’s husband Bert becomes Wang Xuebin (王雪宾), played by Lo Wei (罗维), who also directed the film. Lo is known best for his martial arts films (wuxia pian). He also discovered Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, an accomplishment which has somewhat overshadowed this one.
Their youngest daughter Kay becomes Wang Yulan (王玉兰), played by Yeh Ching (叶青). This is funny casting because Yeh was 19 and at her full adult height. She is meant to be playing a bedridden child.
Suave love interest Monte Beragon is Chen Shangyuan (陈尚元), played by Paul Chang Chung (张忠).
There’s a new character! As part of the character rehab of Veda/Lilian, Shangyuan has an affair with an unnamed woman, played by Angela Yu Chien (于倩). Yu is my favourite SB actress because she’s a camp genius. She’s known for her sensual character roles in wuxia, erotica and rape-revenge films - and she fills in for Dorothy Malone in a later SB remake of Sirk’s Written on the Wind. I wish she had more than 30 seconds of screen time here.
Remake-related issues
Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce did get a Hong Kong release during the 1940s, but during my scouring of reviews and SB press releases in the Hong Kong newspaper archives from 1966-1967 (thanks, HKPL!), I found no explicit mention of YHQM as a remake of the Curtiz film. There is scant evidence that its original audience knew they were watching a remake, and SB make no mention of it in their modern promotional material for the film. The original plot is not totally unaltered - most notably, the Veda/Lilian character is changed to be fundamentally innocent, possibly to improve the film as a vehicle for the up-and-coming Jenny Hu. Shangyuan (Monte Beragon) assaults a drunk Lilian, marries her without disclosing his bankruptcy, cheats on her, and tries to trap her in his house when she threatens to leave.
Aside from this, the general gist of the film is preserved: newly-deserted woman starts a business to support ungrateful older daughter, younger daughter dies, neglected older daughter runs off with woman’s love interest. There’s a mother-daughter slap sequence, after which the older daughter runs off to become a torch singer. Lo also keeps the frame story format of the original - most of the film is told in flashback form, and we keep returning to a police interrogation for an unsolved murder. After going through both films for this dissertation, I found multiple instances of dialogue which were translated directly from the original - most notably, Veda and Kay’s argument about boys and clothes in the film’s first act.
Production/promotion timeline
YHQM was released in February 1967, but announced a year prior. Shooting appears to have started during the summer of 1966. Upon release, the film was advertised in local newspapers with a series of ‘picture stories’ (连图故事), which used stills and captions to serialise its plot over a few weeks. (Interestingly, these are written to refer to the names of the film’s actors, rather than their characters!)
Availability
I keep seeing a 2004 DVD release with English subtitles floating around on eBay. I can’t confirm whether the quality is any good. If you can understand Mandarin then there’s a copy on YouTube in ten parts.
Why isn’t the film in Cantonese if it’s from Hong Kong? (etc.)
Mandarin was spoken by a minority of the population of late-60s Hong Kong. Many were originally emigrants from mainland China, and some fled the country at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong’s Mandarin-speaking population were thought to be at special risk of radicalisation from Chinese Communists at home and abroad.
SB received financial backing, networking and festival screening opportunities from the Asia Project, a US-government-funded nonprofit that targeted Mandarin speakers as part of a preventative anti-Communist soft power alliance along the ‘Free Asia’ axis. Cantonese studios existed in Hong Kong, but their films lacked the technological sophistication of SB and other Mandarin studios (the Asia Project enabled their borrowing of technologies and filmmakers from other participants in the network - in practice, mostly from Japan). The Cantonese market share of the Hong Kong film industry began to drop from the mid-60s onwards.
II The premise of my dissertation
I wanted to write about YHQM because:
Mildred Pierce is obligatory viewing for feminist film critics in the West, but nobody knows about the colour widescreen Mandarin remake! (I only worked out it was meant to be a remake 20 minutes into the film when I first found it online in 2021…)
It is very difficult to find detailed, non-dismissive criticism of Cold War-era Free Asia Mandarin melodrama (SB wenyi pian in Hong Kong, Qiong Yao adaptations in Taiwan, etc). Coverage of left-wing Hong Kong melodrama from the same period is more charitable. This is likely down to a mixture of political and disciplinary bias - academics interested in classic Hollywood would probably be also interested in its second coming at SB, but language barriers and narrow paths of specialisation prevent detailed study.
The current situation is quite similar to that in Western film criticism before the 1970s feminist re-evaluations of the melodramatic work of Sirk, Ray, etc. There is little consideration of melodrama as a vehicle for political subversion, or even just as an outlet for art.
YHQM is very likely the only depiction of a female entrepreneur in Cold War-era Hong Kong cinema (thus proving Fiona Law wrong. And also opening up some questions about the politics of the SB enterprise)
This is what I ended up with as an abstract:
In this dissertation, I provide an analytical sketch of Lo Wei’s 1967 Mandarin-language melodrama Madam Slender Plum (欲海情魔), a remake of Michael Curtiz’s 1945 Hollywood film Mildred Pierce. While other studies focus on the top-down cosmopolitan ideology of the US-allied Shaw Brothers Studio enterprise in Cold War-era Hong Kong, this dissertation uses theories of melodrama, Fordist filmmaking, and bottom-up, satirical ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ to question the readability of its realisation in an actual studio product. The results are complex and ironic. Madam Slender Plum subverts its Hollywood source material and technological medium in order to supply conflicting discourses about life in the ‘colonial border zone’ of Hong Kong.
I owe a lot of intellectual debt to Stephen Teo’s 2013 article on HK opera-erotica director Li Han-hsiang, who worked in Movietown in short bursts during the 1960s and 1970s. Teo lays a good foundation for a proper rebuttal of the standard thesis on ‘Free Asia’ melodrama - that is, that it served as a top-down instrument of pro-Western, pro-capitalist propaganda. Movietown was constructed in the same frame as the Fordist ‘movie machines’ of Hollywood’s studio era, but this is something of a double-edged sword. Its hyper-stratified division of labour is set up for capitalist efficiency - but in practice, it provides infinite opportunities for film workers to subvert the morals and messages of the larger studio, Sirk-style.
III On studio politics and the family melodrama
[Lilian becomes a torch singer in the film’s final act. The song (‘The Old Dream is Lost’) is dubbed by Tsin Ting (静婷). It originated on the soundtrack of 1961 Shaw film The Rose of Summer/夏日的玫瑰.]
I’m interested in SB Movietown as a shadow of Hollywood’s Golden Age, which I think reached Golden status because of a series of strategic links between fiction and reality. This was done by way of the booming publicist-fan-magazine trade (enabled by the vertically-integrated structures of the classic studios) and then through movie casting, where invented personae were bolstered by historical ones (eg. distant, androgynous Swedish Greta Garbo becomes distant, androgynous Swedish Queen Christina). If you’ve studied dynastic Chinese history then you’ll be struck by the fact that MGM et al spent decades engaged in the construction of a parallel Mandate of Heaven. They were official historians!
SB had their own version of this apparatus (there was also an earlier Chinese model of it in Republican Shanghai - here’s a good article). Film stars were scouted, trained in-house, typecast in increasingly large roles, and photographed for official fan magazines such as Southern Screen (南国电影). As with films like A Star Is Born and What Price Hollywood?, the virility of the star-making arm sometimes became an attraction in itself - we see this most notably in Lo Chen’s musical Joy of Spring (1966, 快乐青春), where a spellbound cast take a tour through Movietown and visit established stars on the set of a huangmei opera.
Here I took a lot from feminist critic Catherine Jurca. She gives a dissident interpretation of the original film, which is popularly read as a cautionary tale for enterprising housewives whose husbands are about to return from war. (I’ve never liked the cautionary-tale interpretations of women’s pictures from this era, and they make no sense for this one!! Look at Joan Crawford’s earlier sympathetic-shop-girl roles and then judge for yourself. Mildred Pierce is depicted with extraordinary sensitivity. And her ending sort of is happy because her daughter - eventually revealed to be naturally, irredeemably evil - has finally left her alone!! We know this, but Mildred doesn’t).
For Jurca, Mildred hasn’t done anything wrong - or at least nothing to warrant a web of intrigue, shame, arrest, etc. By merging her business with her family responsibilities, she becomes the model for housewives in a postwar, rebuilt, entrepreneurial America. Veda is no such model because she consumes more than she earns - and Kay, the youngest daughter, is too sick to be of any use to the economy. Hence she is killed off.
Jurca mentions that Mildred’s ‘corporate family’ in Mildred Pierce is a subtle approbation of the nepotistic ‘corporate family’ at the film’s studio, Warner Brothers. This was particularly useful in the mid-40s, when the studio’s vertically-integrated model came under legal scrutiny. The comparison became significant to my dissertation because SB modelled itself after WB - same logo, same production mechanism, same familial structure.
During the film’s second act, Xiumei goes from unemployed housewife to bar owner. She tends to a team of identically-dressed waitresses. I compared Xiumei’s retinue, in its glitzy rationality, to Busby Berkeley’s chorus lines - parallels to and endorsements of the work structures found in major Hollywood studios. This is particularly significant because the Veda/Lilian character takes Xiumei - played by veteran star Diana Chang Chung-wen - as her onscreen mother. Lilian is played by up-and-coming starlet Jenny Hu. Thus there is an element of recursion to the onscreen star mechanism. Watch out, Chomsky!!! Xiumei becomes a feminised, nurturing stand-in for Run Run Shaw, the movie mogul at the centre of the SB enterprise.
IV (Briefly) on the Shaw-Sirk connection
SB wenyi pian of the Movietown era often drew on the work of Douglas Sirk. The most obvious example of this is Lo Chen’s 1969 Torrent of Desire (欲焰狂流), a remake of Written On the Wind - but Sirk’s bright colour palette and heightened displays of emotion filter into other SB melodrama of this period.
We see an additional copy of the staircase death scene from the third act of WOTW in the first act of YHQM. In the original Mildred Pierce, Mildred’s younger daughter dies slowly of pneumonia, which provides little dramatic climax but is well-suited to the film’s confined noir cinematography. Yulan’s Sirkian death in YHQM is a deliberate adjustment - a violent, embodied set piece. It’s a send-up of the Wang family’s wealth (the sweeping staircase destabilises the entire family) and lends itself well to the spacious, widescreen Movietown style.
Characters in YHQM often pose for a few seconds in emotive tableaux, which I originally came to recognise as a hallmark of the Sirk melodrama. It doesn’t come up as much in the original Mildred Pierce, or in most of the studio melodrama I watched from the mid-to-late 1940s. This is melodrama by Brechtian freeze-frame:
V. On CinemaScope vs. ShawScope
From 1966 onwards, all SB productions were made in the widescreen ShawScope aspect ratio. This is conveniently identical to the CinemaScope aspect ratio, popular in Hollywood from the mid-to-late 1950s. Widescreen works in direct negation of the claustrophobic noir aesthetic used by Curtiz for Mildred Pierce. There’s no breathing space in noir, which worked partially as a visual reflection of popular contemporary anxieties (evil lurking around every corner, etc. - the most literal example of this is probably Orson Welles’ The Stranger).
Within Hollywood, widescreen stood (abroad) for Cold War expansionism and (at home) for an ongoing migration from cramped, vertical cities to spaced-out suburbs. CinemaScope Westerns forced the eye to wander around huge, unconquered plains (see: The Searchers, Bad Day At Black Rock, and also Root for more on this). No such sense of space existed in 1960s Hong Kong, where the majority of the population lived in cramped tower blocks. In 1965, a housing crash worsened the situation - and aftershocks were felt until the early 70s.
We see a subversion of the CinemaScope ethos in this sequence from Act 1 of YHQM:
This explicit acknowledgement of Hong Kong’s 1965 housing crash means YHQM is unique - and a bit Sirkian - in breaching the realm of political critique. We find a contradiction to the analysis of SB by Tan See Kam (that it is a vaguely ‘international’ but otherwise ‘apolitical’ enterprise). Lower in the work structure, Run Run’s apolitical internationalism is reused for politics - the sequence pokes fun at the American widescreen medium!!
[剧终]
Music I’m listening to - BONUS TAIWAN EDITION, thanks for reading all the way to the end of this very long post!
Chen Ling 陈菱 - Where Does Love Come From? 情从哪里来 (1973)
Eerie balladry from composer-lyricist team Chi Li-nan and Tang Shan. I love the Bond flourish at the end! Chen is not a member of the Taiwanese pop pantheon - it’s impossible to find anything about her online. But she has a lovely operatic voice… (Here’s more, with bonus psychedelic album art!!)
Yao Surong 姚苏蓉 - You’ve Changed 郎变了 (1971)
Yao Surong is a founding member of the Taiwanese pop pantheon and known for her ‘a-go-go’ singing style. She shows it off on this theme song for a film of the same name, which might be lost (nobody online has seen it. If you’re in Taiwan, check your attic or illegally-constructed sixth-floor extension!). This track is great because it’s half Sixties mania and half classical poetry. Eg. sample line: ‘I am like a fallen flower / and also a floating leaf of duckweed / carried everywhere together on the flowing water.’ (Also - look at the fantastically campy art for this album release!). Yao has a very small amount of Western cache because John Peel played this song of hers (‘Return Your Love to Me,’ but more usually ‘John Peel’s Chinese Record’) on his BBC show in 1987.
Fang Qing 方晴 - Do You Still Remember 你是否还记得 (1972)
Fang Qing must have had the most fascinating life of any of the 1970s Taiwanese pop stars. There’s a long biographical article here, in Chinese - but there should be a film!! She got blacklisted from both the PRC and ROC at the same time, escaped from her own tour plane to work an American factory job, opened a nightclub, and caused a sectarian Buddhist controversy. Her death (by gunshot in a lawyer’s office in Everett, Washington) is an unsolved mystery. This is one of her most popular songs and has been covered widely, including by Louise Tsuei.
Annie Yi 伊能静 - Rose in the Freezer 冰箱里的玫瑰 (2001)
Taiwan meets the Bristol scene AGAIN (I can’t believe I missed out on this last time, the best Sinophone trip-hop since the Cantonese Love Commandments)
I love the idea of a Taiwanese MILDRED PIERCE and the music which goes with it.
Congratulations on your dissertation!
[now the vagaries of British undergraduate classification!]