Beyond the Great Wall (1964) User Reviews (2)

BEYOND THE GREAT WALL – Lavish Shaw Bros. costume drama, with music

[BrianDanaCamp · 27 August 2008]

BEYOND THE GREAT WALL (1959, the date given on the DVD case) is another Shaw Bros. Huangmei opera film, mixing dialogue and singing, set in old China, in this case the Han Dynasty, and stars Linda Lin Dai, the Hong Kong diva who specialized in this genre (DIAU CHARN, THE KINGDOM AND THE BEAUTY, THE LAST WOMAN OF SHANG). Here Lin Dai plays Wang Zhaojun, a concubine who is ignored by the Emperor because an unfavorable portrait of her had been submitted by the corrupt court portrait painter after she'd refused to pay the painter a bribe. When the Emperor chances upon her playing a melancholy tune on her pipa (a stringed instrument), he is enchanted with her and wants to know why she'd never been brought to his attention in the three years she's been there. When he learns what the court painter was up to, he erupts in rage. The painter, Mao Yanshuo, alerted by his accomplice, the Emperor's court secretary, flees for his life and heads out over the plains to the camp of the neighboring Huns, whose leader, Huhanxie Khan, had once taken notice of Zhaojun during a diplomatic visit to court. To save his neck from the Huns, Mao insists he's been sent by the Emperor to arrange a marriage between Khan and Zhaojun. When Khan sends a party with bridal gifts to the Emperor's court, the Emperor is outraged at the thought of giving up Zhaojun and vows to punish Mao's treachery. Insulted at the return of the gifts, the Huns begin a campaign of war against the Hans and attack and pillage at least one town. Back at court, Zhaojun has to weigh her personal happiness against the future of her country and makes a momentous decision.

There's not much more to the story beyond that, other than a powerful ending that I won't even hint at. The film's 89-minute running time is padded out with scenes of ritual, performance, sad farewells, and lots and lots of Huangmei opera singing. Which is fine with me. The film is quite an extraordinarily beautiful work, filled with elaborate sets, stunning costumes, bright colors and a lush score of music and choral singing that's always a pleasure to listen to. It's more of a pageant than an epic. While it's never as emotionally involving as some of the other films in this genre, including three that I've reviewed on this site—DIAU CHARN, THE MAGNIFICENT CONCUBINE, and THE LAST WOMAN OF SHANG—it's still something to behold. And the Region 3 DVD from Celestial/IVL is quite sharp, one of the best-looking of the older Shaw Bros. films that I've seen among the restored releases, on a par with THE MAGNIFICENT CONCUBINE.

Moping and singing

[Leofwine_draca · 4/10 · 11 January 2022]

One of the earliest Shaw films I've seen and another musical which were so popular during the 1960s. This one follows a woman who gets scorned by the emperor due to a misunderstanding and ends up moping around for the rest of the running time. As a sad tale of regret and romance it works to a degree I suppose, but the emphasis is very much on the drawn-out singing so if you're not a fan then you're not going to enjoy it very much. The high-quality look of the film is unlike the studio-bound stories that Shaw would make in the second half of the decade.