More Than Kung Fu

It’s fitting that Shaw Brothers wrapped up the 1960s with the last major haungmei film they would ever make (the genre made a one-film comeback in 1977). No other genre summarizes the 60s Shaw style — light, stylish, pretty and romantic — than the yellow plum opera.

In the early 60s, as Shaw battled MP & GI, it was the haungmei films, and the luscious widescreen Shaw Scope, that set Shaw Brothers apart. Later, when the opera craze cooled and the nostalgia for old styles had faded, the same techniques that powered the yellow plum operas were applied to a slew of more modern musicals, spy films and comedies.

By 1969, Shaw Brothers hadn’t released a yellow plum opera since 1966’s The Mirror And The Lichee. I don’t know why the studio chose to make another opera after such a long break — maybe they had their own kind of nostalgia, or perhaps it was the enduring popularity of star Ivy Ling Po — but they approached the project with gusto, casting Ling Po and Li Ching, their two biggest female stars, in the leads and assigning veteran director Yueh Feng to write and direct.

Like its predecessors, Three Smiles is based on a well-known story, and the film does very little to mess with the haungmei formula that had worked so well for so many films — Tang (Ling Po), a supercilious aesthete scholar, falls for the maid Autumn Fragrance (Li Ching) after she smiles at him, you guessed it, three times. To pursue his love, he sells himself into servitude so he can work by her side.

This “Scholar and the Beauty” storyline formed the basis of the majority of haungmei films — indeed, Smiles‘ plot is almost an exact copy of 1967’s Pearl Phoenix — but Smiles adds a ton of subplots (idiot brothers, a coquettish maid, a jealous cousin, a singing boatman) to lessen the deja vu and increase the comedy.

The film’s standout moments are its opening scenes, filmed outdoors, when Tang and Autumn Fragrance meet. The wide-open vistas make the film more naturalistic than the usual studio-bound operas; and Yueh tries some new stylistic tricks, adapting the freeze-fame effects he used in Bells Of Death for a lighter genre.

But once Tang enters the Hua household, the film begins to choke on its familiar story and overabundance of sub-plots. It’s never bad, but it certainly doesn’t make a case for the freshness of the haungmei genre. Nostalgia can only carry a genre too far; by 1969, it was time for Shaw Brothers to move on to something new.

The Three Smiles
Dir: Yueh Feng
Released: September 25, 1969