Father Takes a Bride
Viewing this film sapped all of my energy away
to the extent that it was a struggle to even write about it. I have found
most of the Cathay releases to be quite delightful in an old fashioned
gee whiz kind of way – but this one felt like carrying a wet sack of potatoes
on a forced march. The title might make one think that this was going to
be a light amusing comedy – that was certainly my expectation – and the
first scene creates that mood, but it then morphs into a very old fashioned
slow moving melodrama that felt awkward and weakly scripted. It also has
two children who are more annoying then gritty sand in your shorts and
I think I can still hear them whining in the distance. Considering the
pedigree of Father Takes a Bride (1963), it is surprising that it feels
so stuck in mud and that it had so little emotional impact.
The film is directed by Wang Tianlin who is best
known to today’s audience as the father of Wong Jing and the often-used
character actor in many Milkyway productions (in The Mission he is the
restaurant owner). Back in the 1950’s and 60’s he was one of Hong Kong’s
most prolific and respected directors with a resume that contained literally
hundreds of films – though many were made in dialects other than Cantonese
and Mandarin and are apparently lost today. Born in Shanghai in 1928, he
moved to Hong Kong as a teenager and entered into the film industry and
took on all sorts of jobs before being able to direct. His first film as
director was “The Flying Sword Hero from Emei Mountain” in 1950 (he was
22 at the time) and he soon gained a reputation as a director who could
finish a film quickly and he could take on any genre. Over the years he
was to direct loads of martial art films, comedies and melodramas. He also
gained a reputation as someone who could direct both Cantonese and Mandarin
films – something that was quite unusual at the time as both actors and
directors generally fell into one camp or the other. His first film for
Cathay (MP &GI) was I believe the 1959 “All in the Family” and over
the next ten years he was to direct some of their biggest and most critically
acclaimed films – Wild, Wild Rose, The Greatest Civil War on Earth, the
Greatest Wedding on Earth, Story of Three Loves and A Mad, Mad, Mad Sword.
The scriptwriter, Eileen Chang, was also a Shanghai
native and is considered one of the finer novelists from China during the
1940’s and 50’s. Born into a well-connected family in 1920, her grandfather
was a highly placed official of the Qing palace and her grandmother was
the daughter of a prime minister. Her parents were separated and Eileen
often seemed to be a pawn between them. At one point her father locked
her up for a long period of time at home and she almost died from dysentery.
In 1939 she left Shanghai for university in Hong Kong where she began to
write for the school journal. Two years later the Japanese invaded the
city – bombs fell right outside the dormitory – and Eileen returned to
Shanghai which was also under Japanese occupation and she began her writing
career in earnest. One of her works was Love in a Fallen City (made into
a film by Ann Hui in 1984) and her writings became very popular at the
time. Other films that were based on her writings are Red Rose White Rose
(1994) and Eighteen Springs (1997). In 1944 Eileen married an official
of the Wang Jingwei regime (the puppet government fostered by the Japanese)
and after the war Eileen came under tremendous censure for her relationship
with this collaborator. Much of this part of her life is depicted in the
film Red Dust in which Brigitte Lin plays a character based on Eileen Chang.
At this point, Eileen began another facet of her
writing career – film scripts – and in 1946 she wrote two scripts that
were made into popular films in Shanghai – Love Without End and Long Live
the Wife. She was still coming under heavy criticism though for her marriage
and one newspaper called her “a walking corpse from the Occupation period”
and in 1952 she left China (then under Communist rule) for Hong Kong. After
a few years of odd jobs she was invited by the newly formed MP&GI film
company to become a part of their script committee. Though she soon immigrated
to the United States (1955), she was to write a number of film scripts
over the next seven years from there. Her first script was A Battle of
Love starring Linda Lin Dai and this was followed by scripts for A Tale
of Two Wives, The Wayward Husband, June Bride, The Greatest Wedding on
Earth, Father Takes a Bride, The Greatest Love Affair on Earth and Please
Remember Me. Interestingly, most of her scripts were light, romantic and
witty affairs taking a very female perspective, while her books for the
most part seem to be very tragic ridden and depressing. To her, film scripts
were basically a way to make money and she wrote them with a general audience
in mind. Father Takes a Bride appears to be an exception to her usual script
style - though it is not in any way tragic, it certainly indulges in a
great deal of melodrama and contains very little humor.
Lucilla You Min is the grown up daughter of her
widower father (Wang Yin, who also played her father in Her Tender Heart
four years earlier), but she also has two much younger brothers (Peter
S. Y. Dunn and Deng Xiaozhou) that she has to care for. In the first scene
of the film, she is riding a crowded bus when she feels a pinch on her
bottom and turns around and sees Kelly Lai Chen whistling a tune. One slap
later she realizes that he is an old acquaintance from school and the pinching
was done by some crabs he was carrying with him – maybe the only time a
case of crabs got someone a date! They begin courting and this leads them
to begin thinking of marriage, but it soon appears that her father is thinking
the same thing with a female friend (Wang Lai) he has come to know. This
leads Lucilla to all sorts of internal dramatics, as she fears that her
brothers will not be taken care of by a stepmother – and in a bit of hit
one over the head plotting device we witness the stepmother next door constantly
abusing her stepdaughter. It all gets quite overwrought with no one acting
very rationally and with the two kids whining up a storm. By the end I
needed an aspirin.
Perhaps I am being somewhat harsh on this film
as likely time more than anything has made it feel very dated – at the
time it may have struck a much more emotional tone with its audiences with
its themes of family, the importance of a mother, the subject of remarriage
and the guilt this creates. But from a cinematic viewpoint there is much
lacking here – the sets are drab, the chemistry between Lucilla and Kelly
is non-existent and their romance is almost a foot note, the passage of
time often makes no sense and the final frantic scene in which everyone
is looking for the two missing children goes on for far too long. The best
parts of the film were the little everyday things – the song on the radio
that Lucilla sings along with as she washes the boy’s hair, the crabs for
dinner and the delight it engenders, the outdoor scenes at the fair and
the park and the trip to the outer islands.
My rating for this film: 5.5
Information on Wang Tianlin and Eileen Chang
primarily from "The Cathay Story" and "Transcending the Times: King Hu
and Eileen Chang".