Crossorads tells the story of a small group of young men and women struggling to survive in 1930s Shanghai or as the film would have it ‘at the crossroads’ in their lives.
After a montage of city sights, the film opens on the riverside where Xu [Yi Ming] is contemplating suicide. His fried Zhao [Zhao Dan] brings him back to his small apartment where we see photos of four young men (labelled Unemployed A to D).
Zhao soon gets an insecure job as a proofreader in a newspaper (working nights) while his friend Tang [future director Lv Ban] works as window dresser. Xu decides to return to the countryside to care for his aged mother while the fourth – Liu – returns to his home in the northeast to fight the Japanese.
Xiao Yang [a 17 year-old Bai Yang] moves in next door having come from the countryside to take up a factory job in Shanghai. The two rooms are separated only by a partition of thin planks rising to about 2.5 metres in height. This soon gives rise to disputes between Yang and Zhao (without them ever actually meeting) as he, for example, pushes his washing over the dividing wall and it drips on her pillow. Conversely Yang’s fiend Yao [Ying Yin] hammers nails into the partition to hang clothes on, knocking the four portraits on the other side of the partition to the ground. (Their landlady is played by Wu Jin would would later reunite with Bai Yang in several 1940s films including Spring River flows East).
Meanwhile the two do meet on the tram on their way to and from work but without realizing they are neighbours (trams feature heavily as one of the signs of Shanghai’s modernity). Yang reveals her romantic interest in Zhao in an elaborate dream sequence.
There is comic mugging, romance between the two leads, unemployment and sexual harassment (Zhao and Tang save Yang from harassment outside her work); while the social and economic context is conveyed though the medium of frequent newspaper headlines.
Eventually, the four remaining – Zhao, Yang, Tang and Yao – meet on the docks where the film started. They learn – again from the newspaper – that Xu has finally committed suicide. But they decide that they must follow Liu and take on this cruel world. The final shot shows the four arm-in-arm striding purposely towards the towering city.
Like many so-called ‘left-wing’ films of the time, Crossroads invovles a mixture of social criticism, sex and romance, comedy and a dash of patriotism (nationalism has perhaps now too negative connotations to describe the intention).
These films can with some justification be criticised for the uneven mix of elements. But it was perhaps this mix of social commentary and sex appeal that made them appealing at the time and they retain that vitality today.
Bai Yang in a contemporary publicity shot
Directed by Shen Xiling (who was to die young in 1940). Zhao Dan is excellent as the young man at a crossroads in his life. Bai Yang is good as the female lead though she perhaps lacks some of the liveliness that Li Lili or Wang Renmei brought to similar films a few years earlier.
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