More Than Kung Fu

I’d like to believe that someone at Shaw Brothers said, “We should not release this movie.” After all, the star had committed suicide before shooting completed, leaving many of her scenes unshot and, after 3 years in production, the film not only lacked its female lead it also felt like a film from the distant past. Taste and style had changed a lot between 1963, the year The Blue And The Black began production, and 1966, the year it was finally released. I hope that someone looked at this Frankenstein of a film and said, “No.”

That man, if he even existed, was certainly frog-marched out of Movie Town, the Shaw Brothers studio, and put on a boat to Macau. A one-way ticket grasped in his still surprised hand. Any logical or moral reasons to withhold The Blue And The Black fell before one name, Linda Lin Dai.

When Dai committed suicide in 1964, she was working on three, maybe four*, Shaw Brothers films. The highest-profile of these was The Blue And The Black, a two-part, 4-hour epic based on a novel tracing the unrequited love of two teenagers through the Japanese occupation of World War II and the Communist defeat of the Nationalist army. The novel, which was part of a genre that bashed communist China, was popular—unsurprisingly—in Taiwan, the government of which allowed Shaw Brothers to shoot the film on the last remnant of the Republic Of China, using the island’s soldiers as extras.

Even at more than twice their length, the film is little more than a repeat of the plots of weepies like Vermillion Door or Love Without End. In fact, several of Love Without End’s most popular scenes are blatantly restated in The Blue And The Black and lead actors Lin Dai and Kwan Shan are asked to little more than repeat their performances from that 1961 Shaw favorite. The fact that the actors were nearly twice the age of the characters bothered no one, although it makes the first half of the film nearly incomprehensible. Seeing the 30+ Kwan Shan bawl like a high school boy is downright disconcerting.

Even if Dai had not killed herself, it’s unlikely that the movie would have been very good. The novel’s politics have been stripped from the script. Shaw films were largely apolitical, attempting to satisfy a wide range of audiences. Paul Fonoroff, a Hong Kong film critic, explains on the DVD’s commentary track that Shaw was considered a “Right Wing” studio, meaning they favored the Republic over the Communists. But communism is hardly even mentioned in The Blue And The Black, much less criticized.

Lacking the novel’s historical and political background, the script also takes no pains to adapt the sprawling book to the more limited silver screen. Instead of rewriting or consolidating the many side-plots, the film simply skips them and then mentions years of story in passing with lines like, “Remember when I nearly died in Hong Kong?” Um, no. No I don’t.

Without character development, backstory or political relevance, most of The Blue And The Black comes off as a jury-rigged weepie set in the indefinite past. On the DVD’s commentary track, Fonoroff and Lawrence Ah Mon, a current Hong Kong director, spend most of the movie’s first half describing the film’s many, many faults. Perhaps that’s why the commentary track is mysteriously absent from the second half.

When the film awkwardly ends with the embrace between Kwan Shan and a substitute who is obviously not Lin Dai (the Dai double was named Elsie Tu and Shaw billed her as the new Linda Lin Dai), all the film’s faults crystallize. Blue And The Black is just a stand in, a four-hour filler for a star, a genre and a style that had been lost years before.

The Blue And The Black (I and II)
Released: June 30 and July 21, 1966
Dir: Doe Chin

*I’ve seen both numbers. I’m not sure which is correct.