The Bride Napping
At first blush – as the movie fills its super-wide frame with a historical setting, beautiful women (including the dreamy Betty Loh Tih) and a prediction of romance – it would be easy to mistake The Bride Napping for a “Yellow Plum” opera, an extremely popular genre in Hong Kong.
But as the plot’s mistaken-identities, cutting jibes and social satires pile up, The Bride Napping transforms into a screwball comedy in historical dress. The film’s sole musical number – certainly the most beautiful Shaw Brothers musical number I’ve heard – discards the simple structure and rural sound of the “Yellow Plum” genre for a complex, striking and modern ballad.
That one musical interlude aside, the film stays close to the rules of romantic screwball comedies, cementing the romance of Lie Yuen Ying (Ding Ling) and Pien Chi (Kiu Chong) – a rich man’s daughter and a down-on-his-luck scholar – in the first ten minutes and then postponing consummation and audience satisfaction with a combination of capers, confusion and cross-dressing. The Bride Napping’s two-hour length is almost epic for Hong Kong cinema and the film does bog down towards the end as the rapidly growing pile of misunderstandings and antics stretch the genre’s loose boundaries of believability.
Besides its unusual length, The Bride Napping adds a few twists to the screwball romance genre; Betty Loh Tih, undeniably the movie’s star, disappears as the film concludes. Witty, intelligent and outspoken, she’s the Katherine Hepburn in this Bringing Up Baby. But, unlike Hepburn, she doesn’t get the man. A more streamlined plot would have combined the two female leads into a single role and let Betty Loh Tih have all the fun.
Bride Napping is also one of the first romantic comedies to resolve the confusion through melee combat. By 1966, Shaw Brothers would be known for its swordplay choreography, but The Bride Napping shows Shaw’s gymnastics in a very primitive form. I suspect that these awkward fights, more typical of a local dinner theater, are not the ultimate example of late-50s/early-60s Hong Kong fight choreography, but they do show a more stage-bound and hesitant style that had not yet been absorbed and adapted by Shaw Brothers studio.
Ian Whitney
Published: 2004-03-11