When does Shaw Brothers begin? It would seem to be an easy question. According to the Hong Kong Film Archive, the first film released by the Shaw Brothers studio was probably The Magic Touch, released in December of 1958¹.

But to only look at the name preceding the film is to simplify a more complex question. The Shaw Brothers company didn’t just spring into existence fully-formed in 1958. The Shaw family had been making films in Hong Kong since 1952 under the name “Shaw and Sons”. And even that company was a new-comer in the Shaw family’s filmmaking history. Their first Hong Kong studio, Nanyang, was formed in 1933. Before Hong Kong, the Shaws made and distributed films in Shanghai.

The name above the titles is a largely arbitrary division, so we should look elsewhere to find the legendary ‘first’ Shaw Brothers film. Maybe we should look for the first film made by the man most identified with Shaw Brothers — Run Run Shaw.

Until 1957, Run Run Shaw mostly worked in Singapore, running the distribution side of the Shaw industry². But Shaw and Sons was facing increased competition from MP & GI, and Runde Shaw’s super-economical productions were paling in comparison to more stylish films. Run Run moved to Hong Kong, took over the running of Shaw and Sons, changed the name to Shaw Brothers and, for the next 25 years, produced the films that made Shaw Brothers an internationally-known name.

But determining exactly when Run Run’s influence supplanted Runde’s is a nearly impossible task. Run Run’s first producer credit is also the first film to be released under the Shaw Brothers name, The Magic Touch³. But Runde’s name continues to appear on film credits through 1959. And it’s hard to believe that in an industry that turns out movies in a matter of months that it took over a year for Run Run to get involved in the filmmaking process.

The official Shaw Story complicates this question by firmly attaching the ‘start’ of Shaw Brothers to 1959′s The Kingdom and the Beauty, even though it was released months after The Magic Touch.⁴

Maybe it’s less about the name or the producer, and more about the style that made the studio famous. The rich colors, the widescreen image, the attention paid to costumes and beauty. With that criteria in mind, The Kingdom and the Beauty comes to the top again. It wasn’t the first color film made by a Shaw studio⁵, it may not have been the first widescreen film⁶, and it wasn’t the first to present a mythically beautiful ‘historical’ China. But it’s the first to really combine all of the elements that made Shaw Brothers famous in the early 1960s.

But The Kingdom and the Beauty could never have been made if the studio hadn’t made Diau Charn the year before. Whether that makes Diau Charn the ‘first’ Shaw Brothers film a ‘proto-Shaw Brothers’ film makes little difference — Diau Charn is one of many links in the filmmaking chain between Shaw and Sons and Shaw Brothers.

Diau Charn was not the first haungmei opera film, but it was the first haungmei made by a Shaw studio. It’s unclear who approved the idea, Run Run or Runde Shaw⁷. Since a previous haungmei film had done well at the box office⁸, it seems likely that either producer would have approved of the idea.

Diau Charn shows the studios shift to more elaborate productions under Run Run Shaw’s leadership. Filmed in color and replete with fantastic costumes, the film still shows much of Runde’s penny-pinching ways — the sets are uninspiring, the camera movement limited.

What pushes Diau Charn from the realm of “interesting documentation of a studio in transition” to a Shaw classic is the performance of Linda Lin Dai as Diau Charn, an orphan girl tasked with bringing down a corrupt official and his son, who she loves. Coquettish, conflicted and crestfallen Lin Dai won her second Best Actress for Diau Charn, and it’s the best performance I’ve seen her give in a Shaw film.

If it weren’t for Lin Dai, I doubt that Celestial Pictures would have gone through the trouble of restoring this film for DVD. To date, it’s the oldest Shaw film that they have released on DVD. And I don’t expect that they’ll release anything that pre-dates it. As far as Celestial is concerned, Diau Charn is the first Shaw Brothers movie.

1: I say ‘probably’ because the HKFA’s book Hong Kong Filmography 1953-1959 says that the first movie released under the Shaw Brothers name was 1959′s Day-Time Husband, while their other book The Shaw Screen states that it was the earlier The Magic Touch. I’m inclined to agree with the earlier date.

2: Most information in this paragraph comes from Stephon Teo’s Hong Kong: The Extra Dimensions.

3: The Shaw Screen and Hong Kong Filmography agree on this point.

4: The relevant part of the official Shaw history is here: http://tinyurl.com/272hxf

5: It’s not clear when a Shaw studio first made a color film. According to The Shaw Screen it may have been 1939′s Reunion. Like most Hong Kong studios in the 1950s, Shaw and Sons made very few color pictures. Interestingly, many of the films they did shoot in color featured either circus performers or erotic dancers from Japan^A. Make of that what you will.

5a: Hong Kong Filmography 1953-1959 is full of fascinating details like this one.

6: I can’t find any information on what film introduced Shaw’s trademark Shawscope.

7: Sam Ho in The Shaw Screen suggests that it was Runde. But the start of filming may have been after Run Run Shaw returned to take over the company.

8: The Heavenly Match according to Sam Ho in The Shaw Screen.

Don’t let the title fool you, A Comedy Of Mismatches is not what you expect. Remember when you read Shakespeare in high school and couldn’t figure out why the plays weren’t funny? Then the teacher explained that in Shakespeare’s time ‘comedy’ meant a play in which everyone got married, not a play in which Ben Stiller got kicked in the testicles.

There’s absolutely no testicle kicking in A Comedy Of Mismatches, but there is a lot of marrying and a lot of confused couples. After a chance meeting in a temple, two couples exchange tokens of affection. Unnerved by their screaming parents, the couples muff the hand-off — each girl gets the wrong boy’s fan and each boy gets the wrong girl’s hanky.

And since the tokens are monogrammed, each lover ends up with the wrong name. This would not be a problem, if the boys didn’t immediately arrange to marry the women they thought they met — hence the mismatches. Instead of being engaged to true love Liu Weiliang (Pat Ting Hung), the scholar Sun Yulang (Chin Feng) is actually engaged to a woman whose hanky he got by mistake.

Shenanigans with a third couple, who are mostly kept in the background, lead to the marriage of the Sun and Liu anyway. But thanks to a set of baroque coincides that only happen in romantic comedies, Sun is dressed up as a woman and Liu is wearing the groom’s robe.

While all these mis-communications and wacky situations could develop into comedy, they never quite do. Instead of pushing humor, A Comedy Of Mismatches sticks to romance. And even that never really fills out, thanks to the shapelessness of the characters. Beyond Liu’s desire for a good match, and Sun’s goofy humor, we never learn much about the couple or what they see in each other.

Instead of characterization, the film spends its final 10 minutes recapping in painful detail exactly what happened in the previous eighty minutes. Just in case it was unclear, I guess.

With a little more wit, or some development of its numerous couples, A Comedy Of Mismatches would be more memorable. Instead, I used it a cheap way to mention kicking Ben Stiller in the testicles.

The Comedy of Mismatches
Dir: Hsieh Chun, Law Chun
Released: May 14, 1964

A cloistered woman denied true love by status-hungry parents? Yes. A man wrongly accused of a crime? It’s in there. Wait, isn’t this the same story as The Crimson Palm, a film that came out just six weeks before The Female Prince?

For about 20 minutes, it seemed that the Shaw studio was simply going to recycle the exact same story — again — and wait for the haungmei-hungry audiences to pay to see Ivy Ling Po cry her way through a grim tragedy — again.

Thankfully, The Female Prince instead of diving deeper and deeper into tragedy escalates this plot into an entertaining farce. Every time things look bleak for our heroines, Qin Feng Xiao (Ivy Ling Po), and her maid, Chun Lan (Li Ching), they simply lie cheat and charm their way out of the hangman’s noose, smiling all the while.

And with each lie, the pair find themselves in a more improbable situation and celebrating an other unlikely success — quickly followed by a new life-threatening crisis. The more Feng Xiao lies, and the more she rebels against the gender roles that have held her back, the brighter Ivy Ling Po shines. I’ve always enjoyed Ling Po’s comedic work more than her weepie work in films like The Crimson Palm — and The Female Prince gives full rein to her mischievous skills.

Ling Po’s undeniable charm is also the film’s most curious aspect. The Female Prince was the second of two haungmei films made by director Chow Sze-Loke and scriptwriter Chang Cheh. Chow came from the world of Cantonese filmmaking, where he worked in a huge variety of genres. Chang Cheh, not yet a famous director, had just joined Shaw Brothers as a screenwriter. His first film for Shaws, The Amorous Lotus Pan was a bold break from the female-focused films that Shaw Brothers had been making; instead of sympathizing with the female lead, Chang vilifies her and champions her revenge-hungry brother-in-law Wu Song.

But in The Female Prince, clever women are put center stage, bamboozling the bumbling men that threaten them with loveless marriages — very much a return to the traditional Shaw story that Chang railed against in his film critiques. Did Chang want to show Shaw that he could write a film in their style, or did the Shaw management ask him to tone down the blood? Maybe Chang just wanted to be faithful to the story’s operatic source. Regardless of the why, comparing the films provides an intriguing contrast between the Shaw styles of the early 60s and the style that would emerge in the late 60s — and this one’s fun to watch, to boot.

The Female Prince
Dir: Chow Sze-Loke
Released: December 10, 1964

Film genres tend to follow a cyclical life-cycle: first, a film or two introduces a new genre; then, if the introductory films are successful, more films follow in the trailblazers’ wake. These first-wave films can be simple recreations of the original films — success begets imitation, after all —  or they might tweak the formula slightly, looking for an even more profitable result.

Eventually, the genre settles into a predictable rhythm. Producers find out what works and stick to the safe bets. As the genre begins to age and wear out its welcome, filmmakers begin to experiment, mutating the tried-and-true formula hoping to evolve it into something new. If this works, a new genre appears and the life-cycle begins anew. If not, the genre fades away.

Introduced in 1958, by 1964 the haungmei opera genre had settled into its quiet middle age; while some exceptional opera films were being made — Lady General Hua Mu Lan, for example — many more were simply following the successful huangmei formula.

The Crimson Palm falls into the latter camp, unfortunately. Despite the presence of hauangmei superstar Ivy Ling Po, little in the film elevates it above the mass of haungmei films released in the mid-60s. It’s never bad, it’s just lifeless.

Part of the problem may be the unavoidable familiarity of the plot. Most of the “star-crossed-lovers betrayed by the justice system” story-line mirrors 1963′s The Adultress. Even that film’s climactic ending reappears here — and it would be used again in 1965′s Inside The Forbidden City.

1964 would be the end of haungmei’s complacent middle age. In 1965, slightly more adventurous haungmei films began to appear: The Mermaid pushed special effects; The Grand Substitution reflected the growing trend of manly violence in Shaw films;Inside the Forbidden City kept the haungmei structure, but explored darker themes of revenge. None of this experimentation worked, however. Haungmei never managed to evolve into a new genre, and largely disappeared from Shaw Brothers by the late 1960s.

The Crimson Palm
Dir: Chen Yu-hsin
Released: October 28, 1964

A refreshing change from Shaw Brothers’ normally over-dramatic dramas, Lovers’ Rock delivers the drama, but keeps the hysterics to a minimum. Instead of the usual credulity-straining trials of a star-crossed couple, director Pan Lei focuses on small town characters and a mostly believable love triangle.

Lovers’ Rock was Pan Lei debut film with Shaw Brothers, but he wasn’t new to filmmaking. As a writer and director Pan had worked in the Taiwanese film industry since the late 1950s. To Shaw Brothers, Pan probably seemed the perfect package — an intelligent, literary director that had connections with a group of Taiwanese actors and experience working under Taiwan’s single-party, martial-law government. Could there be any better combination for a studio looking to expand their market share in the island nation?

And so Pan’s first film for the Hong Kong studio was filmed in Taiwan, with an almost all-Taiwanese cast (mostly actors that had previously worked with Pan Lei, I suspect) about a Taiwanese fishing village. Gee, I wonder who this film was made for?

Regardless of why Shaw Brothers hired Pan Lei, the studio ended up with a smart, flexible and talented filmmaker with some serious writing skills. While at Shaws, Pan worked in worked in nearly every genre. And with films like Lovers’ Rock and The Fastest Sword, he beefed up normally thin genre films with thoughtful scripts and smart acting.

The plot of Lovers’ Rock was pretty common fare in the early 1960s — doomed lovers and family dramas were the building blocks of most Shaw Brothers weepies. So when outsider Qin Yu (Chiao Chuang) falls for the coquettish but confusing Lin Qiuzi (Cheng Pei Pei), everything feels very familiar.

But Pan surrounds this plot with a mostly scruffy-looking assortment of character actors, many of whom worked with Pan Lei throughout his career, that provide the small fishing town with a believable population and a solid foundation for the action. This sort of attention to small roles was uncommon at the star-focused studio, as was Pan’s focus on strong, realistic acting.

Well, mostly strong acting. Lovers’ Rock‘s main stumbling block is its male star, Chiao Chuang. I’ve never cared for his abilities as an actor and in Lovers’ Rock he’s required to channel a James Dean attitude that he never achieves. The gruff, flawed character of fisherman Da Gui (Huang Chung Hsin) is always more interesting than Qin — it’s a shame he’s missing for one-third of the movie.

The third star, Cheng Pei Pei, would become a major Shaw actress after Lovers’ Rock. But after 1966’s Come Drink With Me, it was rare to see her in modern-day roles. She acquits herself well here as the confused and confusing modern teenager Lin Qiuzi.

With Lovers’ Rock, Pan Lei established himself as a unique voice at Shaw Brothers. Currently, only a smattering of his films are on DVD; I’m looking forward to seeing more.

Lovers’ Rock
Dir: Pan Lei
Released: October 17, 1964

Can a film honestly be called a musical if it contains no signing for the first ninety-percent of the movie? What if it also contains almost no dancing? Maybe defining a musical more a question of style instead of content.

For 97 minutes of its 109 minute running time, no one sings in The Dancing Millionairess. And the film’s first dance routine isn’t until minute 45 (yes, I kept track). And while the movie ends with a celebration of singing and dancing, the film still feels pretty barren when it comes to musical numbers.

But yet The Dancing Millionairess still feels like a musical, even in its talkiest moments. The tone is light, the pace bouncy, the colors bright and the stars polished. It’s got everything a musical needs — except for the singing.

One of the tricks to making a musical, at least a musical in the Hollywood style, is to create a world in which people breaking into song is not abnormal. For example, the highly artificial set-design used in classic Gene Kelly films helped to create a sense of other-worldliness that helped make the singing more normal. West Side Story opens with a perception-changing top-down view of Manhattan, in the hopes that singing gang-members will seem less bizarre.

Perhaps after watching tons of MGM musicals, I’ve come to associate their visual aesthetic with the musical genre. So any film that apes this style, which The Dancing Millionairess frequently does, becomes a musical in my mind — even if there’s almost no signing.

And so Doe Chin recreates the successful style he used in the earlier, more musical musical Les Belles, dropping most of the singing in favor of poetic narration and replacing complicated dance routines with light, poppish boogieing — leaving much of the movie’s charm in the hands of real-life couple Peter Chen Ho and Betty Loh Tih.

The pair does well, especially once they are allowed to unite on-screen — a gratification that is delayed far too long. The film’s highlights are their scenes of content relaxation.

Sadly, those scenes are few. Most of the film is muddled by an exceedingly complex romantic-comedy plot that I could not explain even if wanted to. All that really matters is that there’s a dance troupe that wants to put on a show and corporate president Betty Loh Tih has the money they need — cue the misunderstandings, cute meetings and jaunty music.

Although The Dancing Millionairess ends on a crowd-pleasing high, there’s not much positive to say about the preceding 90 minutes. The film never really hits a comedic stride; instead it just bumbles along until its stars can finally share the screen. Musical or not, the film is far from Shaw’s, or Doe Chin’s, best.

The Dancing Millionairess
Dir: Doe Chin
Released: February 12, 1964

Like the previous year’s Yang Kwei Fei, 1963′s The Adultress adapts a famously tragic story into a showcase for Li Li-hua. Unlike Yang Kwei Fei, The Adultress doesn’t have to excise chunks of its source material in order to make its star likable. The result is not only a more coherent film, but a far better performance from its prolific star.

Adapted from an opera, and maybe from an even older story, The Adultress retains is musical heritage, but it’s hard to think of it in the same category as Shaw’s other early 60s musicals. Although classified as a haungmei film, The Adultress‘ songs are few and far between, usually only appearing at the moments of strongest emotion. The rest of the film is plain-spoken drama, free to focus on its story of corrupted justice and the painful sacrifices of unrequited lovers Xiao Bai and Yang Nai Wu.

Sold into marriage as a child, Xiao Bai (Li Li-hua) pines for her brief but unfulfilled love affair with the gifted scholar Yang Nai Wu (Kwan Shan). Though she loves Yang, Xiao Bai remains faithful to her sullen husband, Xiao Du (Zhu Mu). Not that the gossipy villagers care, their endless taunting only inflames Xiao Du’s jealousy.

After catching the eye of Liu (Peter Kang Kwan), son of the local magistrate, Xiao Bai is drugged and raped by her spoiled stalker. Shamed and afraid, she won’t tell her husband about the attack. But the jealous husband spots the evidence of Liu’s attack and immediately blames Yang.

After Xiao Du is killed by an increasingly creepy Liu, Xiao Bai and Yang are accused of murder and thrown onto the non-existent mercy of the Chinese courts.

Corrupt judges, bribed witnesses and confessions extracted via torture–these and other various brutalities of the Chinese judicial system consume most of the rest movie. It’s all very dramatic and nerve-wracking, and excellent work from both Kwan Shan and Li Li-hua makes the already compelling story more engrossing.

Unlike many Shaw Brothers weepies, its very hard to guess how The Adultress will end. Most Shaw dramas clearly telegraph their stories, relying on the over-the-top emotion to draw audiences in. I imagine that the story was familiar enough to Chinese audiences that they would already have known the ending. But it was all new to me and I was glad that the film kept me on my toes.

In Yang Kwei Fei, Li Li-hua had to work against the abbreviated film in order to deliver an appealing performance. But in The Adultress she could work with the strong story and dramatic direction to deliver a great performance.

The Adultress
Dir: Ho Meng-hua & Li Han-siang
Released: August 9, 1963

One of the few huangmei diao comedies, Return Of The Phoenix delivers a light alternative to the genre’s usually overwrought plots — and romance, of course. You can’t have huangmei diao without romance.

As with most huangmei films, the plot is whipped-foam light. Mu  (Chin Feng), a young fighter from a disgraced family, is engaged to Xue-e (Lee Heung-gwan), beautiful youngest daughter of a former general. But through the machinations of Xueyan, the general’s oldest and least attractive daughter, Mu believes that he’s engaged to a deluded, slutty reject.

Meanwhile, Xue-e’s also being pursued by another admirer, Prince Chu (Cheung Kwong-Chiu), the moronic bucktoothed nephew of the Emperor. Let the comedy begin!

Most of the comedy comes from mistaken identity and the unattractiveness of the Xueyan and Chu. And, for the most part, it’s pretty simplistic stuff. Unlike The Bride Napping, another comedy with huangmei roots, there’s nothing very witty about Return of the Phoenix, despite the presence of two of Shaw’s best comic actors, Go Bo Shu and Cheung Kwong-Chiu.

At least there was nothing that witty in what I saw. But I’m severely handicapped when it comes to huangmei films. With their simple music and familiar plots, one of the main draws of huangmei films was their lyrics. Since I don’t speak Mandarin, I’m going to miss any puns, allusions or bon mots that might be hiding in the words. I’m entirely dependent on the subtitles, and subtitles have a way of hiding humor.

So it’s possible that Return Of The Phoenix may be the funniest thing since a drunk Oscar Wilde. I wouldn’t know.

Return of the Phoenix
Dir: Kao Li & Li Han-hsiang
Released: July 24, 1963

One of my main goals in writing about the Shaw Brothers films is to talk about why they made the films they made. To me this is more interesting than talking in the typical platitudes of the film critic — “A thrill a minute! Two ears up! Etc”. Because of this I love watching Shaw’s adaptations of classic Chinese literature. Of the common Shaw Brothers genres none do a better job of illuminating the ideological engines that drove the studio’s output.

Audience familiarity with the source material was a big bonus for Shaw Brothers; just like today, most audiences are more willing to watch known quantities than unfamiliar stories. So Shaw Brothers frequently adapted novels, poems and pulp serials to the big screen. Few sources would have been more familiar to audiences than the classics, stories that had been memorized and retold for centuries.

And the classics had the advantage of flexibility; when Shaw Brothers adapted popular modern novels they probably had much less freedom when adapting the story to suit their tastes. After all, the studio expected that most of their audience had read, or heard about, the novel. Thus the film needed to deliver what people expected.

But with classical stories these restrictions mostly disappeared. While the stories were well known their descent through the oral tradition resulted in many different, conflicting versions. Like languages, these stories had evolved into an array of dialects.

Take the story of Yang Kwei Fei. If you google the name right now, the top results will contain at least three different versions of her story. These stories will mostly agree on the historical particulars — her name, who she married, how she died — but will disagree on almost everything else.

To Shaw bosses, this divergence was perfect. Since there was no single story to adhere to, the films could deliver characters that everyone knew, while the studio could still adjust the story to meet their needs — be those needs marketing, moral or cultural.

And the most important need of Yang Kwei Fei was that its star, Li Li-hua, look good. So the morally conflicting story of China’s great beauty, a woman who nurtured and loved the man that overthrew a dynasty, thus causing her own death, becomes an oddly disjointed glamour film about the tragic, tearful scapegoat of a nation.

In the early 1960s, when Hong Kong films featured and were made for women, it would have been hard to portray Yang Kwei Fei, or Li Li-hua, in an completely unflattering light; although Yang starts the film as a cruel and jealous concubine, she quickly and mysteriously softens by the film’s halfway point.

Yang’s character development isn’t helped by the film’s extreme brevity. At just over an hour long the film feels like it’s missing its entire middle act. In order to get to the tearful ending, it was probably just easier to skip over the parts of the story where Yang behaved less glamorously.

And, in the end, this film is really all about glamour. Director Li Han-hsiang features Li Li-hua in every way possible, surrounding her face with appropriately lush backdrops; Yang is Li’s film, from her steamy introduction, to her tearful end — and there’s no way that she would be shown in anything but the most positive light.

Yang Kwei Fei (sometimes called The Magnificent Concubine)
Dir: Li Han-hsiang
Released: May 31, 1962

Another almost entirely forgettable low-grade wuxia film starring people who have done better work in better films. Shaw Brothers made so many of these in the late 60s that it’s honestly hard to figure out which one is which, or come up with something new to say for each review.

What makes writing about these films even trickier is that they are so incredibly bland. Far from creative, but also far from terrible. They just coast along in the muddy, uninteresting middle of the road. Blah.

But, for a few minutes at least, Swordmades looked like it was going to break out from the mediocre pack. After establishing a traditional “swordsman chasing a secret message” plot, the film quickly veered off in a new direction, tentatively exploring the petty jealousies that drive the women of the bandit clan; it appeared that the film’s second act would be instigated by hatred that bandit mistress Hsin-yin (Chiu Sam-Yin) feels towards her stepdaughter, the film’s hero, Yan-niang (Chin Ping).

But that story is quickly supplanted by more by-the-book plotting — vicious criminals, long-lost siblings, etc. Nothing new to see here, move along.

However, even unoriginal movies can be made well. But Swordmates never strives for that sort of quality. It’s content being a jambalaya of cliches — filling the time, but leaving no impression.

Swordmates appears to be the only Shaw Brothers movie directed by Cheung Ying, about whom I can find very little information. An actor by trade, Cheung Ying directed a few Cantonese movies in the ’50s and ’60s. Although he acted in films for over 50 years, The Swordmates was the last film he directed.

Cheung’s Cantonese background, along with that of co-director and writer Poon Faan, highlight Shaw Brother’s evolution from a northern, Mandarin-style studio to a southern, Cantonese one. Had the film been better, and a touch more Cantonese, perhaps it would be as well remembered as The Chinese Boxer.

The Swordmates
Dir: Cheung Ying
Released: October 18, 1969