The Black Forest
This movie tries on a lot of different hats before settling on being a love-triangle melodrama.
Set at a logging site in the mountains of Taiwan it starts off as a musical, with the loggers getting in to a friendly singing battle against Margaret Tu Chuan. At this point I thought maybe the film would end up being a folk musical swapping the traditional fishermen for loggers.
But no. The movie then pivoted to a pseudo ethnographic musical look at the indigenous people of Taiwan, similar to Song of Orchid Island.
But it dropped that after a scene or two and settled on a decent love triangle between lunkhead Paul Chang Chung, the kind-but-brittle rich Lisa Chiao Chiao, and the pure-hearted ‘indigenous’ Margaret Tu Chuan.
It also won an award for best choreography, even though I don’t remember there being much dancing in it?
Of the many films it tried to be, I was content with the film it ended up being. It wasn’t great, or even particularly good, but I’d rather a romantic melodrama than another Orchid Island or Songfest.
Fun fact about the director Yuan Qiu-Feng. Most of his filmography isn’t on LB. Never a standout director with Shaw Brothers, he left the company not long after this to work for MP&GI and start his own company. But he returned to Shaw Brothers to take Raymond Chow’s job when the latter left to form Golden Harvest.
Also, he directed the amazingly-named Booze, Boobs and Bucks.
As part of “The Unsubitled Dozen” I tried a different AI subtitling service for this one. This service had the advantage of subitling all of the dialog. But the disadvantage of those subtitles frequently being nonsensical.
What did it mean when Fanny Fan said “Beloved kitten set fire outside Oh, hey, I smile blueberry wine”? I may never know.
Ian Whitney
Published: 2025-02-08