A Place to Call Home
By the time of this film in 1969, the Shaw Brothers
ruled the cinema screens throughout Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia
and their main Mandarin competitor Cathay films was only a faint echo of
its former glory. The two production houses had battled it out for years,
but in the end the Shaw’s larger budgets and scope of variety allowed them
to eventually marginalize Cathay. In particular, the immense popularity
of the martial arts films propelled Shaw forward while Cathay stayed with
their dramas, musicals and comedies until it was too late to compete with
Shaw. The one genre though that Shaw never was able to emulate as well
as Cathay was the simple family drama. This was Cathay’s bread and butter
and they perfected these small emotional hearth and home dramas in such
fare as Mambo Girl, Our Sister Hedy and The Greatest Civil War on Earth.
Interestingly, in this film Shaw seems to take a step back in time and
attempts to make this type of film with a plot very reminiscent of the
Cathay classic Mambo Girl with Grace Chang.
In fact for close to two thirds of the film, it
follows in the footsteps of Mambo Girl like a shadow to good effect and
it is only when it decides to add some lurid melodrama of its own that
it goes off track and loses the emotional build up. Like Grace in Mambo
Girl, Li Ching is the most popular girl in school – the star of her field
hockey team and able to knock out a song whenever her friend (Irene Chan)
requests. Her family is a close one with her loving father (Yan Jun), her
protective mother (Ouyang Shafei) and her two younger sisters. All seems
bliss, until her middle sister (Margaret Hsing Hui) becomes jealous of
Li’s boyfriend and has her feelings hurt in a misunderstanding and then
overhears that Li was adopted when she was a baby. In a moment of pique
Margaret spills this out to Li and Li’s whole world comes crashing down
on her.
Feeling like a charity case, she is determined
to track down her birth mother and with her father’s help she is able to.
Her birth mother (Go Bo Shu/Kao Pao-shu) it turns out lives in rather squalid
surroundings and is now married to Yeung Chi-hung, an unemployed fellow
of uncertain morals. Even so Li decides to move in with her mother and
leave her other family behind with promises to visit on occasion. One look
at that apartment and I would have scooted back to my nice middle class
existence so fast I would have left my shoes behind. Soon though her “uncle”
is looking at her in a lecherous way and has plans to use her to help pay
his debts and mom is making money by having foreign sailors buy her drinks
in a bar. The film completely misses out at this point by making Li somewhat
unsympathetic and by a lackluster and lame conclusion unlike Mambo Girl
that ends on a note of absolute emotional and musical perfection.
One of the enjoyable aspects of the film are the
four older “character” actors who play the adults. Between them there is
a lot of film history and hundreds of movies. Ouyang began acting in the
late 1930s in Shanghai and by the age of 19 she was being feted as one
of the great actresses and beauties of her time. By the early 1950s she
had moved to Hong Kong where she again took up acting and starred in many
films. By the next decade she had moved into character roles – often playing
older mothers though she was only in her early forties herself!
Go Bo Shu is another interesting case. Born in
1932 she had worked as a reporter and acted in a theatrical troupe that
toured around Asia before she was twenty. In 1951 she married Chiang Nan
(who later acted for the Shaw Brothers) and moved to Hong Kong where she
acted in both film and radio. In 1958 she joined the Shaw Brothers and
was an often-used character actor for the next decade. Though only in her
thirties she often portrayed women who were middle aged such as in The
Love Parade and The Dancing Millionairess. She also became interested in
working behind the camera and helped out in the dubbing department and
as an assistant director. In 1971 she finally had her opportunity to direct
and her debut film was Lady with a Sword starring Lily Ho. Not too long
afterwards she left Shaw and formed her own production company in which
she produced, directed and acted. These are difficult to locate now but
have interesting titles such as The Cannibals and Female Fugitive.
The father in this film also has quite the long
resume. Yan Jun (Yien Chuen/Yen Chun) was born in 1917 in Beijing and after
moving to Shanghai in 1938 he entered into the acting profession. He soon
gained a reputation as being adept at playing both good and bad guys. Like
so many others, he moved to Hong Kong after the Civil War in 1949 and worked
for a number of different companies and was in a few classic films such
as A Strange Woman with Bai Guang, Modern Red Chamber Dream with Li Lihua
and Ouyang Shafei, The Flower Street with Zhou Xuan, The Little Phoenix
with Li Lihua and The Blood-Stained Begonia with Bai Guang. He also began
directing in 1951 and has films like Singing Under the Moon, The Orphan
Girl, The Grand Substitution, Moonlight Serenade, That Fiery Girl and The
Bride Napping to his credit. During the fifties he formed his own production
company and entered into a partnership with Cathay films. In 1959 he married
the legendary actress, Li Lihua but after he was diagnosed with a heart
ailment in 1972 he retired from the business and they both emigrated to
the United States in 1973. He died in 1980.
My rating for this film: 6.0
Information on actors gathered from various
sources: Monographs of Hong Kong Film Veterans, The Cathay Story, Hong
Kong - The Extra Dimension, the DVD biographies and this site
dedicated
to Li Lihua.