The opening is promising with the courtyard of children being trained in acrobatics by the opera troop, while the female impersonator lead bewails his lot now that local war lord Zhu has shown lecherous interest in him. Is this character the cinema's first degenerate? Anyway we're on the way to a corrective to FAREWELL to the CONCUBINE.
Unfortunately the plot soon veers into soap opera. The child of the illicit couple grows to be the actress playing her mother, raised by her disfigured dad. The odd moody shot resembles the director's MIDNIGHT SONGS.
The glimpses of Chinese Opera are unremarkable. The sound is like a US film of ten year earlier and the opticals are covered with white negative scratches. This one shows the lively Shanghai film of the thirties in decline but it's still better than more admired Chinese items of the day like THE SPRING RIVER FLOWS EAST.
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