Wu Yonggang (born 1907) is famous as the director of his first film The Goddess, starring Ruan Lingyu. This is justly regarded as one of the best ever Chinese movies and indeed a classic of silent cinema. But who has seen any of his other films?
In fact, based on Douban, Wu directed 34 films (and wrote or cowrote the screenplay for 21 of them). After The Goddess in 1935, he released a rather different film Little Angels (below) followed in 1936 by two more: the excellent Waves Washing the Sand (about a detective and the criminal he is tracking who are trapped on a desert island) and a National Defense film Soaring Aspirations (also below).
In the period 1938-41 he directed a further 14 films including the multi-director 1941 version of The Family. But, apart from Family, only two of the 1938-41 films have votes on Douban: Rouge Tears (1938, a remake of Goddess) and Chinese Snow White (1940) suggesting that they are not available or not extant at all (and I am not sure that even Snow White is extant). Many of these films featured major stars such as Jin Yan, Chen Yanyan and Wang Renmei so it would be all the more surprising if copies are not tucked away somewhere in the Chinese Film Archive.
Wu may have gone to Chongqing (the Nationalist capital) after the fall of Shanghai in 1941 but, if so, he was not credited on any of the (small number of) films made there during the war. He made a further four films between 1946 and 1949 which again appear to be unavailable.
After 1949, Wu remained in the PRC (unlike many filmmakers) and made A Remote Village in 1950, his last contemporary film until after the Cultural Revolution. During the Seventeen Years and after, Wu made occasional films but these tended to be operas (e.g Liu Sanjie (1979)), based on traditional stories (Lin Chong (1958)) or operas based on traditional stories (You Sanjie (1963) based on A Dream of Red Mansions) – a ploy also adopted by other filmmakers to avoid getting into trouble. Many of these are available (without subtitles) but even with subtitles the nuances of such films would be largely lost on me.
However, in 1979 he is credited as general director of the excellent Scar film Evening Rain (right).
His last film was as co-director of the much more traditional looking Chutian Incident (1979) about the Northern Expedition of 1927. He died in December 1982.
Although Wu wrote a (posthumously published) memoire, very little has been written in English about him or his films (other than Goddess). See here for one exception. Both Wu and his films deserve proper reassessment.
Little Angels [小天使] (1935)
Quite different to his first film, Little Angels is in line with the Guomindang government’s New Life Movement to promote cultural reform and Neo-Confucian social morality.
The film opens with a view of a large house. Outside the wind is howling but inside the sparsely furnished home, the Huang family enjoy domestic bliss with the (plainly dressed) women (including the daughter [Wang Renmei though her talents are largely wasted in this] knitting and sewing while the father smokes a pipe and reads. The older son is away on military duty (presumably defending the country from the Japanese).
Next door with the Yang family things are rather different. Jazz music blares from a radio; the women wear fashionable qipaos; and cigarettes are smoked. A disapproving tone is obvious. The Huang family tuck in to their meal while Mr. Yang chooses to go dancing with a young woman rather than join his family for dinner.
Despite the differences between the families, the two young sons get into scrapes and go to school together. But when Yang Da loses a silver coin at school, Huang Min is expelled from the school having been suspected of stealing, though this is later resolved. Eventually after similar trials, the two families are reconciled for the good of society.
A transitional film, it has music and sound effects but no spoken dialogue. Available (in quite a good print but without translation) on the Columbia University site. Unfortunately though, despite some clever cinematography, it is rather slow-moving and didactic,
Interestingly the Chinese title is the same as that for the Shirley Temple vehicle Our Little Girl, also released in 1935. There, in another moralistic tale, a young girl tries to patch up her parents’ broken marriage by running away. But the Chinese film was based on a script commissioned by Jiangsu Education Department from Guomindang intellectual Jiang Xingde.
Soaring Aspirations [壮志凌云] (1936)
Soaring Aspirations marks yet another shift in genre for director Wu with this National Defense film. Lao Wang [Tian Fang] and his daughter Niu’er flee warlord violence in the 1920s (her mother died in the fighting). Along the way they find and adopt the orphan Shun’er whose mother has also died.
Eventually Lao Wang and a group of pioneers make their way to the border provinces and establish a new village. Many years later, Niu’er [Wang Renmei] and Shun’er [Wang’s real-life husband Jin Yan] are young adults.
The villagers, led by Shun’er, band together to fight off ‘bandits’ (who we only see at a distance). Censorship made it impossible to name the Japanese but the fact that the bandits are numerous, uniformed and have heavy weapons might have left few members of the audience in doubt about who they really were. In case anybody missed the point, the villagers fight under the then Chinese national flag.
The village is surrounded by the bandits but one villager makes his way to a nearby town and, after some initial reluctance, persuades them to come to their aid.
There is an element of comedy in this film (Han Langen appears in his well-used comic simpleton role) but it perhaps most closely resembles a contemporary western where the brave pioneers are surrounded by the Indians and saved by the cavalry. Interestingly in this case, the ‘cavalry’ arrive on foot and with pitchforks, i.e. the onus is entirely on the people (rather than the national army) to defend the country.
As is common in these types of film Niu’er (who takes an active part in the fighting) dies at the moment of victory (as Li Lili’s character was to do in Storm on the Border (1940)).
This is certainly not the best Wu film. As Laikwan Pang points out, Wu does not capture the rural village (obviously shot in studio) with the same verve as he films Shanghai. But, as usual, he integrates the different strands (drama and comedy) much better than most directors of the time and, of course, the National Defense theme was presumably the most important point of the film (though it is done with more subtlety in, for example, Fei Mu’s Blood on Wolf Mountain)..
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