The Family!'cen~5 from a n'l'entC:hinesc film, reviewedin this issue. whieh tellst}l(~ stOI'Y 0)£ rOll I' gener­'d.ions of a Chines,,'fum ily

The rebellious youngergcneration. The secondgrandson visits Ching,his beloved (standingin the door), who aftet·having l'lipped her hairand refused the Gov­ernor's son is hidingin the home of hersehoolmatf'

The Kao family on l\ewYear's Eve

Taoist priC'sl staging a gho Lhunting ceremony is thrownout by the radieal thirdgrandwn. "There is no ghostin my room," he says, and thepriest agrees diplomatically

ON THE SCREEN

Beginn'ing with this i8sue we shall present Tflviews of films which webelieve to be of special interest to the readers of this magezine eitherbecaIlt8c of their subject matter or because 0/ their manner 0/ handlingim1JO'rtant 1881/e8 of our time.-K.M.

The Family

Produced by the Hsin Hwn Motion PictureCompany, Director S. K. Chang.

In 1937 Pa Chin 'Published a novel, TheFamilll, which soon became a Chinese best­seller and is now in its twenty-second edition.The author had earned his fame long beforethrough 'a number of popular works, but TheFamilll became his greatest success. Sincethen he has written two sequels, first Sprill11,which tells of the revolt of the youngergeneration in the Kao family against the oldergeneration with its deep-rooted Chinese tradi­tions and conventions based on a narrowinterpretation of Confucianism; and the second,Autumn, describin~ the downfall of the oldergeneration. A third sequel is in preparation.

It has been said that the novel is theauthor's autobiography. He is supposed tobe one of the grandsons depicted in the novel,struggling against the old generations andobsolete traditions. One of the author'suncles, in fact, wrote to the author complain­ing about the veiled att3cks against him inthe novel. Pa Chin, in a preface to the tenthedition of the book, emphatically denied thatallegation. He admitted, however, that hisearlier life in Chengtu gave him hisinspiration.

The scene is laid in the Chengtu of twentyor thirty years ago, and the story that offour generations of the Kao family. Thereis grandfather Kao who, as the patriarch,rules his large family with an iron hand.There are his sons, two of them good-!or­nothings, growing up in the shadow of theold man without rights or responsibilities,behaving like schoolboys, gambling, and fool­ing around. There are the three grandsons,two of' whom represent the new China whileone, the oldest, is trying to bring about acompromise in his life between old and new.And there are the first great-grandchildren.The grandfather as well as his sons andgrandsons have their wives or concubines orlovers. Most of them live in the Bame greathouse, and the drama of their lives is thestory both of the novel and the film.

While the novel attacks old China on abroad front, the film concentrates ita mainfire on one old Chinese custom, the matchmak­ing by the elders for their young ones. Thistradition, the film tries to show, is nothingbut bad, for it leads in almost all cases tounhappiness and disaster. The eldest grandsonloves a girl whom he is not allowed to marryand who dies of consumption. The slave­girl whom his brother loves drowns herselfwhen she is forced to become the concubine ofa fat and elderly rascal-and so on.

There are also some side-attacks againstother old traditions, such as a Taoist priest'shOCUS-pocus, and the custom that no childmay be born in a house containing an unburiedcorpse. This leads to the death in childbed ofthe fir~t grandson's wife due to the neglectshe suffers when she is rushed off to someother house.

A~ainst everything old there rise the youngheroine and hero of the novel and film: thegirl Ching, loved by the second grandson. who'shows he.r attitude by cutting off her hairand rc!using to marry the Governor's son; andthe youngest grandson, who decides to leavebackward Chengtu for modern Shanghai.

Except for two minor digressions the filmis a fairly faithful reproduction of the novel.In producing the picture, the Rsin HwaMotion Picture Company, one of the largest inShanghai, China's Hollywood, broke a recordestablished some fifteen years ago, when anow defunct picture company gathered aUavailable stars and produced a star-studdedpicture known as TM New FamilJl. Curiouslyenough, that picture was an attack on the"small family" system, while the currentproduction, also an all-star picture, may becalled a scathing attacl!! on the old ¥bigfamily."

Billed as an "extra-.super-production," Til.Familll has in its cast practically all of thecurrently favorite movie stars, such as MissYUlan Mei-yuan, who handle~ the role ofCousin Mei; Miss Chen Yung-shang as CousinChing; Liu Chung, "China's Clark Gahle,"

ON THE SCREEN 153

as the second grandson; and Miss Koo Lan­chung in an impressive performance as wifeof the first grandson.

In order to muster all available talents, thecompany went so far as to shoot part of thepicture in Hongkong where- they enlisted theservices of two of the veteran movie starsof China-Miss Butterfly Wu, known as"China's Movie Queen," and Wong Yuan-lung,once the most Dopular leading man. As aresult, the sets in Shangl:l8i and Hongkong,though purporting to depict the same house,are not identical.

The company also mustered a number ofwell-known directors to work on the picture,each directing a section of the film under thesupervision of the head of the company, S.K.Chang.

The acting and the stage sets of the film areexcellent. To be sure, for western taste someof the scenes are too drawn-out--the wholefilm lasts three full hours. But the cleverchange from comedy to tragedy and to lyricallove-scenes holds the interest of the spectatorthroughout.

As is the case with every film with a"message," this one also has some exaggera­tions, and too much of a black-and-whitemanner of presenting things. There are someexceedingly powerful scenes of stark realism,particularly the distorted features of the firstgrandson's wife, when, assisted by the old­fashioned midwife and a young girl, she givesbirth to a child and dies in the process.

The Family is a typical drama of emancipa­tion and reminds one of a certain tyPe ofEuropean literature of the nineteenth century.Its message is that everything will be fineonce the old traditions, laws. and ways oflife are overthrown. The world today andChina in particular have proved that the realtrouble only began with emancipation.Emancipation does not tend to lead individualsand nations straight away to the happinesswhich they expected, but rather into an innerand outer chaos, at least until new traditions,laws, and ways of life have been found toprovide the frame-work within which man canfind the necessary happy mean between thetwo extremes of slavery and anarchy.

* * •

The Fifth Ocean

Produced by the Kiev Studio, Director I.Annensky. In the leading parts: A. Abri­kossov (Leonty Shirokov), E. Gorkusbla(Sanyta), I. Novoseltsev (Kirillov), A. Garder(Natasha).

The Soviet film The Fifth Ocean, s~.own

recently in Shanghai, was advertised as "a

new artistic film about the life of Far Easternaviators." But to those who expected to seea film of the Soviet air force on the shoresof the Pacific, along the lines of the recentAmerican picture Flight Com.71land about thelife and training of the American air force onthe West Coast, this film is a disappointment.That the plot is supposed to take place in theSoviet Far East is not apparent from the film:it might just as well have been any otherplace in the large Soviet Union, or even inany other coun~ry. For apart from Soviotuniforms and Russian dresses there is nothingparticularly Sovietic about the film.

The plot is very simple. Leonty. a strong,healthy, but independent and self-willedhunter, decides to become an aviator in orderto travel in what he calls the "Fifth Ocean,"that is, the air. - He joins a flying-school andfalls in love with Natasha, the fiancee of hisinstructor. At the same time another can­didate for the school, the ~rl Sanyil, pas beenrefused admission because of her youth. Havingfallen in love with both Leonty and flying,however, she sticks around the airport as aservant in the restaurant. Leonty has allthe qualifications to become an excellentaviator; his independent and undiscipline<!personality, however, worries his superiors.For example, when Natasha returns fromleave he lands his plane on the square outsidethe railway station in order to be the first togreet her, a breach of discipline for which heis punished. The whole film seems to be de­signed to impress upon young Russians theimportance of discipline, and dilltsiplina isthe word most used throughout the film.

In the end, of course, ~onty refofDls.Durin~ a test flight he has a crack-up be­cause the airport mechanic had bungled hisjob. Yet Leonty's newly-won self-disciplineleads him to take the blame upon himself inorder not to implicate the mechJanic. It al­most looks like the end of his dying career;but the mechanic steps forth and confesseshis ~uilt. Leonty becomes a great aviator andreturns several years later with the decora­tion of "Hero of the Soviet Union" to visithis old flyinlt-schooI. Natasha and the in­struct{)r are married, and Sanya has in themeantime become a pretty pilot. The specta­tor is left with the impression that a secondmarria~e is in the offin~.

There are many humorous lines in the dia­logue. Leonty's carefree song is cleverlyused as a leitmotiv that accompanies his self­willed actions ;and gradually develops-­parallel to Leonty's own evolution-into apowerful marching tune. But as regards thephotography and acting the film is consider­ably belo\'( the high standard frequentlyfound in Soviet films.-K.M.