An early Chinese sound film about the iniquities of life in 1930s Shanghai. The story is told in flashback after a school principal recognises one of his favourite pupils in a newspaper story about a crime and goes to visit him in jail.
Tao Jianping [Yuan Muzhi who also wrote the screenplay] and his sweetheart Li Lilin [Chen Boer] graduate from secondary school and get married. Jianping gets an office job with the Hongdi shipping company. But he resigns in principle rather than overload a ship as his boss instructs him.
His search for new employment is difficult and nepotism counts for more than qualifications. JIanping grows increasingly depressed (and scruffy). Eventually Lilin gets an office job with manager Ma [Zhou Boxun]. Jianping also gets a new job through an old schoolmate and all should go well. But he again gets into a row with his boss on a matter of principle and losses his job.
The now pregnant Lilin becomes the breadwinner while Jianping cooks meals at home. Mrs Ma becomes suspicious of her husband’s feelings for Lilin and her position becomes uncomfortable. But being more practical than the principled Jianping she does not intend to leave her job.
Then the lecherous Ma brings her to a luxury hotel, ostensibly for a meeting. She escapes his attentions but Jianping accuses her of fawning on the manger and hits her. Although they are reconciled, things go further downhill from there and Jianping is reduced to manual labour in a large factory.
Lilin gives birth to a boy but falls downstairs a few days later. Jianping can’t afford to send for a doctor and his employer refuses an advance of wages. So he steals the money to pay for the doctor. And things quickly descend into tragedy.
The film is well-intentioned and provides interesting insights into social attitudes. It also contains some striking visuals capturing the constraints on both Lilin and Jianping (above).
But it is overly long and (at the end) melodramatic and the acting is rather stilted (Chen Boer, who was an active left-wing film-maker but only appeared in a handful of films, is an exception). It certainly lacks the economy of The Goddess or the verve which Yuan Muzhi later brought to his own film Scenes of City Life.
Directed by Ying Yunwei (who directed the first 1938 version of Eight Hundred Heroes) for the left-leaning but short-lived Diantong Film Company (which also made Scenes of City Life). The title [aka Fate of the Graduates] is a play on the family names of the two main characters. Chen later married Yuan before her early death in 1951.
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