Series Site
October 19–28, 2023
“We are delighted to welcome back to BAMPFA film expert Paul Fonoroff with a series highlighting Mandarin-language musicals from 1957 to 1963, during the genre’s postwar rebirth. By the mid-1950s, Hong Kong was beginning to stabilize economically, with a new optimistic urban middle class anxious to see their lives reflected on screen; at the same time, nostalgia for the mainland and traditional Chinese culture remained.
This series showcases the films that emerged from these desires—whether in visions of intoxicating city life, such as the city hipsters in Mambo Girl and nightclub lounge lizards in The Wild, Wild Rose, or in throwbacks to Chinese fables and courtly operas, such as the star-crossed lovers of The Love Eterne and the celestial princesses of A Maid from Heaven. The latter are two of the greatest examples of the widespread huangmei diao film genre, which updated classic Chinese staged opera with modern cinematic aesthetics and a decorative, almost pulpy embrace of theatrical artifice. We also pay tribute to a mainland Communist musical whose distinct style proved popular in Hong Kong: the cheerfully tuneful, anti-capitalist Third Sister Liu, set in the striking limestone karst waterways of Guangxi.
These five films also reveal a who’s who of postwar Hong Kong’s greatest stars, especially the songstress Grace Chang, who switches effortlessly from bubbly youth in Mambo Girl to jaded nocturnal temptress in The Wild, Wild Rose, and Ivy Ling Po, a mainstay of the huangmei diao genre famed for playing male leads in both The Love Eterne and A Maid from Heaven.”
—Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer