More Than Kung Fu

My Dream Boat is the earliest example I’ve seen of a Shaw genre that has me befuddled. I call these films “musical tragedies,” but that doesn’t capture their schizophrenic nature. The films begin with a series of up-beat and snazzy musical numbers and, once they have lulled me into believing I’m watching a less glitzy version of Hong Kong Nocturne, dispense with the music entirely and fill their final hour with soul-crushing depression.

Tragedies and musicals can be mixed, just look at West Side Story or Shaw’s Love Without End (1961), but Musical Tragedies make no attempt to blend the genres; there is 30 minutes of musical and 60-90 minutes of tragedy and never the twain shall meet. The whole thing feels like a weird attempt to sell women the ultimate cinema experience—music, romance and soap-opera melodrama.

The musical section of My Dream Boat introduces a group of young friends in Taipei. Step siblings Jia Wen (Yang Fan) and Jia Lin (Essie Lin Chia) live with their father and celebrate Christmas with Wen’s girlfriend Tang Ke Shin (Lily Ho), her friend Cheng Shian Yi (Ching Li) and Wen’s long-lost school buddy Kei Yuan (Chin Han).

The group goes on a hunting expedition in the land of awful rear-projection. Shaw movies never had much use for fancy special effects, but it’s still hard to fathom how they could so completely butcher a simple technique like rear projection. As the group sings about the joy of nature, waterfalls and forests are projected behind them on a screen that, if it didn’t flutter in the breeze, I would assume was a dirty factory wall. Inexplicably, these rear-projection shots are intercut with shots of the actors on a real mountain. Why not just film the whole thing on the mountain? Knowing Shaw Brothers the answer to that question is almost certainly budgetary.

The music comes to an abrupt end when Lia Wen runs into the wrong open clearing and is shot by an overanxious hunter. From that point on, the film is nothing but pure soap: gambling addiction, unwanted pregnancy, unrequited love, suicide, tears and angst. With the exception of a quick ditty celebrating the joy of road construction (it makes slightly more sense in the context of the film), the film’s musical opening is forgotten.

Adapted from a novel by Taiwanese writer Qiong Yao, the story suffers from the same problems faced by most of Shaw’s literary adaptations, it’s just not possible to stuff multi-part serial novels into 90 minutes of screen time. Qiong Yao is best known for writing long-running TV series, a format far better suited to her stories, which follow a large group of characters over many years.

When adapted for film, Qiong’s plots simply can’t work. Complex back stories are quickly hinted at, years disappear and the already tenuous believability is further strained. Take, for example, the film’s symbolic boat. Although the English title suggests a “dream boat” hero, the literal Chinese title is simply Boat; Appearing infrequently in the film is a carved boat and discussions of how life is like a boat. It’s all a bit hokey; but the book, with more space to develop this theme, might have carried it of a bit more successfully.

My Dream Boat
Dir: Doe Ching
Released: September 28, 1967