More Than Kung Fu

When Celestial releases these DVD, they include a brief plot synopsis that quickly becomes the default description of the film as every DVD retailer quotes it verbatim. Here’s the description for Madam Slender Plum:

It’s a murder-mystery in the vein of an old Alfred Hitchcock movie where Jenny Hu plays the feigningly ignorant older sister to the coquettish Diana Chang, where each have an affair with the same cheating man.

There are a couple of problems with this.

1. It’s not a mystery.
2. Jenny Hu does play an older sister, but she’s never ‘feigningly ignorant;’ she’s just naive.
3. Diana Chang is Jennu Hu’s mother, not her sister. Unless there was a huge amount of incest-related backstory left out of the movie, it’s hard to confuse the two.
4. Diana Chang spends the movie being anything but ‘coquettish.’
5. The two women never have an affair with the same man.

Unless this is a description of an entirely different movie, I find it hard to believe that anyone at Celestial even watched Madam Slender Plum, which is a shame since it’s largely a decent film.

Xiumei (Diana Chang) and her husband Xuebin (director Lo Wei) are living in luxurious idyll with their two children Lilian (Jenny Hu) and Yulan (Angela Yu Chien). But after a serious of excessive tragedies (it is Shaw Brothers, after all), the money is all gone and mom goes to work to satisfy spoiled, whiny Lilian’s need for the latest fashions and fancy cars.

Xiumei has a knack for the nightclub business and opens a successful bar, reuniting the family with their money, spacious home and fancy cars. But, in the typical movie dichotomy for women, she gains financial success by sacrificing her family’s happiness, thereby allowing Shaw Brothers to break out, yet again, the scene in which a woman is ashamed for becoming a nightclub singer.

Almost every Shaw film set in the modern day has this scene; the woman, desperate for money, turns to a life of cabaret singing, shaming and embarrassing herself and everyone who knows her. Considering that acting is not far removed from singing, I wonder how the actresses felt about this recurring cliché. It’s one innuendo away from comparing them all to whores.

The film does owe one debt to Hitchcock; in his 1950 film Stage Fright, he experimented with flashbacks by having the narrator lie to the audience. The audience, feeling betrayed, was pissed off. Madam Slender Plum tries a similar experiment, and mixes in a bit of Rashomon to boot, but with far less success. Rashomon worked because it hid the important details from the audience, allowing them to debate between the four versions of the truth. Plum, on the other hand, makes everything crystal clear and then declares it all a lie. It’s a frustrating attempt to add a gimmick to a film that required no such trickery.

Madam Slender Plum
Released: February 23, 1967
Dir: Lo Wei