Hong Kong, 1957: Little Women In the Mood for Love

11 Mar

OUR SISTER HEDY (1957) is a black-and-white comedy-drama shot in Mandarin in sync sound at the Cathay Studio in Hong Kong and stars Jeanette Lin Tsui, Julie Yeh Feng, Mu Hong and Dolly Su Feng. Directed by Tao Qin (aka Doe Ching), it’s about four sisters in a middle-class home high in the hills above Hong Kong who care for their widowed father and get in and out of various romantic entanglements, with marriage the ultimate destination, though not necessarily their initial goal. It’s been described as a modern-day take on Little Women, although aside from there being four sisters and Hedy (Jeanette Lin Tsui) behaving like Jo March at times, the two don’t have much in common. It may be more like Pride and Prejudice, the Jane Austen novel, which had five sisters gradually being positioned for marriage. However, there’s a distinct Hong Kong flavor to the nature of this story and the way it’s told and the time it was made, setting it quite apart from its inspirations. It even includes a look ahead to Wong Kar Wai’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000), which is set in HK five years later. The film is amusing at times, melodramatic most others, and consistently charming, especially with this group of actresses.

Mu Hong as Hilda

All four sisters have full-time jobs and all find different paths to marriage. Eldest sister Hilda (Mu Hong) works as a secretary and juggles her own romantic dreams with the job of riding herd over her rambunctious sisters. After losing two boyfriends to second sister Helen, Hilda gets hired as a governess by a widower with two daughters who lives in Macau and owns a factory there. You can guess the rest. (Cueing Rodgers and Hammerstein!)

Julie Yeh Feng as Helen, with Peter Yang Kwan as her co-worker

Second Sister Helen (Julie Yeh Feng) is an artist working for an advertising firm who resents having her modern designs rejected in favor of “ordinary” art. When it comes to men, she plays the field and keeps stealing Hilda’s boyfriends, finally choosing one of them, an engineer named Sun (Peter Chen Ho), after flipping a coin to see which one she’ll marry, and then cheating on him.

Jeanette Lin Tsui as Hedy

Third Sister Hedy (Jeanette Lin Tsui) teaches fencing at a boys’ school. She dominates the film, meddling in everyone else’s affairs, while ignoring her own. She meets Heyan (Kelly Lai Chen), the rich cousin of her best friend, Zhenhua (Chang Chien-Fei), and the two seem to fall in love at first sight. Yet Hedy takes her sweet time letting him into her life. He has lots of time on his hands and follows her around like a puppy yet she’s impatient with his idleness and voices this in a conversation with Zhenhua that he happens to overhear, prompting him to inject some resolve into his life. A serious accident late in the film moves fate along.

Dolly Su Feng as Hazel, seen here with Tien Cheng

Fourth Sister Hazel, aka Susu (Dolly Su Feng), has only recently graduated high school. She works, but it’s not clear what she does. Hazel is the youngest—aged 17—yet is the first to marry–to an airline pilot no less, played by Tien Ching–and she seems to have the least turbulent life of any of them. She even winds up in stewardess training. (She plays a stewardess in a later Cathay production—in color—AIR HOSTESS, 1959.)

Dolly Su Feng in AIR HOSTESS

Wang Yuan-Long as Mr. Kong, surrounded by Hedy, Hilda and Helen

The beleaguered father, Mr. Kong (Wang Yuan-Long), sits around the house smoking his pipes and attempting to mediate the girls’ frequent squabbles. He can be quite critical at times. He sometimes invokes their mother, who died when the girls were quite young, and recalls his admonition to Hilda to always look out for her sisters before herself. He clearly has his hands full. The film opens and closes with his birthday celebrations one year apart.

At one point, there’s a group date to a movie, engineered by Hedy to get Hilda to connect with Mr. Sun. The theater they attend is playing Elia Kazan’s BABY DOLL (1956), a controversial film in the U.S. when it was released. There’s no indication of how this particular Hong Kong audience reacted.

There’s a song and some dancing. Jeanette sings about fencing while teaching the boys in the school gym. Later she dances the cha-cha with Heyan at a party.

At an earlier party, Helen dances with Sun, who’s dating Hilda at the time, and causes quite a furor, ignoring even her own boyfriend, Fu LiFu (Wong Chung), whom Hilda had also initially been dating.

Fu LiFu (Wong Chung) stands by helplessly as his girlfriend Helen (Julie Yeh Feng) flirts with Sun (Peter Chen Ho), Hilda’s boyfriend.

Hedy, who’d worked so hard to bring Hilda and Sun together, is outraged at Helen’s behavior.

Jeanette Lin Tsui, as Hedy, is a delight, a boundless source of energy, good cheer and drive, with bursts of occasional fury, especially at Helen. Hedy’s story would have made an interesting enough film by itself. She’s like Jo from Little Women, but no one else is really like anyone in Little Women, as far as I can tell, although Helen might recall Amy in some way. Hedy is also a bit like Elizabeth from Pride and Prejudice.

Jeanette was quite a big star at the time, but I have very few of her films in my collection. She played a key supporting role in A STORY OF THREE LOVES, a two-part color drama from Cathay in 1964, that starred Grace Chang (her last film).

The most dramatically interesting character in HEDY is Helen, played in a languid, sardonic mode by Julie Yeh Feng, who had quite a confident show biz demeanor in the other films I’ve seen her in. She’s the one sister motivated by self-interest and also the most personally ambitious. She appears to be the most worldly. She doesn’t seem to change much in the course of the year depicted, except when we glimpse brief moments of dissatisfaction and hints of frustration. (She also drinks.) I found her the most fascinating character in the film and I certainly would like to have seen the subplot about her career aspirations developed more. A whole film could have been built around her and her discontent. She openly disrupts the façade of the happy, harmonious family the film otherwise tries to display.

Trouble at the office, in a scene with Peter Yang Kwan as her co-worker, David, the boss’s son:

Here are pix from another film I’ve seen Julie Yeh Feng in, a black-and-white musical entitled IT’S ALWAYS SPRING (1962), which co-stars Annette Chang:

In researching OUR SISTER HEDY, I found out about a color sequel, entitled WEDDING BELLS FOR HEDY (1959), which reunites most of the main cast. Here are some intriguing images from it on HKMDB:

It’s interesting to compare HEDY to Wong Kar Wai’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000), which was set in Hong Kong in 1962, five years after this film was made. It’s quite a contrast. Hedy and her sisters live in a spacious middle-class home and her friend Zhenhua lives in a big house with a tennis court. When Sun and Helen get married, they live in a large spacious apartment. These aren’t like the cramped apartments we see in IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, where two married couples rent rooms in adjacent apartments occupied by older couples and shared with other people, with a constant mahjong game going on. The marital troubles of the two protagonists of that film, played by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, might in fact reflect the future fates of a character or two in HEDY.

In any event, I’m not sure which film is most historically accurate regarding the size of apartments. Of course, they might both be true to their period since what seemed normal in 1957 might have changed drastically in Hong Kong by 1962, given the turbulence there at the time and the increase in migration from Mainland China. There is frequent talk in the later film of people getting out of Hong Kong.

Hilda in HEDY has a similar wardrobe to that of Maggie Cheung’s character in the later film. They both favor Cheongsam dresses.

Cathay contract player Kelly Lai Chen is in both movies. He plays Hedy’s boyfriend in OUR SISTER HEDY and Mr. Ho, Maggie Cheung’s boss, in IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, made 43 years later. (He passed away in 2018 at the age of 84.)

OUR SISTER HEDY was directed by Tao Qin (aka Doe Ching), who later directed dramas, comedies and musicals for Shaw Bros. in the 1960s. LOVE PARADE (1963) was a romantic comedy with musical numbers that co-starred Linda Lin Dai and Peter Chen Ho.

MY DREAMBOAT (1967) was a melodrama based on a work by Taiwanese novelist Yao Chiung and starred Lily Ho, Chin Han, Essie Lin Chia and Ching Li.

HEDY was one of a number of pre-widescreen Academy Ratio black-and-white dramas in the Mandarin language produced by the Cathay Studio in Hong Kong, Shaw Brothers’ leading rival in the late 1950s and early 1960s, mostly shot with sync sound, as OUR SISTER HEDY is (sound recorded on the spot as they filmed). I’ve seen a handful of these, including MAMBO GIRL (1957) and THE WILD, WILD ROSE (1960), both starring Grace Chang, and CINDERELLA AND HER LITTLE ANGELS (1959), starring Linda Lin Dai. They were a departure from the Cantonese language films which had thrived in Hong Kong up to that point and they adopted more polished production values, particularly after they shifted to color productions like AIR HOSTESS (1959), SUN, MOON AND STAR (1961), and A STORY OF THREE LOVES (1964), many of them starring Grace Chang. They’re less stylized than the Shaw Bros. films and less lavish. While Shaw Bros. offered grander entertainment, I get a sense from the Cathay productions of being a little closer to what the Hong Kong audience was thinking, feeling and maybe experiencing, even if they’re a bit melodramatic and overwrought at times.

Peter Chen Ho and Linda Lin Dai in CINDERELLA AND HER LITTLE ANGELS (1959)

Grace Chang in THE WILD, WILD ROSE (1960)

Grace Chang in A STORY OF THREE LOVES (1964)

AIR HOSTESS (1959)

In any event, I’d like to see more early Hong Kong films, particularly some of the Cantonese films. I did watch one last year, without any subtitles, part of the long-running Wong Fei Hung series starring Kwan Tak Hing, who played the part over 32 years in over 100 films from THE STORY OF WONG FEI HUNG (1949) to DREADNAUGHT (1981). The one I saw was called HOW WONG FEI HUNG PITTED SEVEN LIONS AGAINST THE GOLDEN DRAGON (1956) and was quite a revelation. It was a poor print in the VCD format, but when the fight scenes break out in the second half, one can see the roots of HK’s later kung fu masterpieces, especially when we see Shih Kien (ENTER THE DRAGON) and Lau Kar Leung (MAD MONKEY KUNG FU) fight with legendary martial artist Wong Fei Hung. I just wish some of these were available in good copies with English subtitles.