I've recently been more heavily investigating the monolithic collection of Shaw Brothers films that were released (usually in the Shaw Brothers chains of theatres!) throughout the decades in many asian countries beginning in the early 1950s. Supposedly there are about 1,000 releases from SB, and Celestial Pictures has been releasing a truly staggering amount of them, according to wiki pages around 760 of them. They are fairly nice packages as well, with vintage cover designs and at least some kind of attempt at special features. The main letdown on them are some fairly weak subtitling jobs at times. Scarecrow in town here brought in what must have been all the available SB discs a few years back and at one point they had a massive SB-only bookcase of them.
So after beginning to dive into this abyss of hundreds of movies, Ming Wong had his In Love for the Mood exhibit at the Frye in town here in February which featured a significant aspect of the SB world, dozens of photos of the old SB moviehouses which have all since closed and gone away. It was a sufficiently crushing exhibit, as these theatres were a sight to behold in their day, and this collection was a spotlight on that fact as well as the fact that their day is gone forever. Seriously, crushing.
Even more recently, Scarecrow's current (March) "Actor of the Month" bookcase has their spotlight on Linda Lin Dai, apparently renowned as the "Movie Queen of Hong Kong" who won four Best Actress awards, three of which were Shaw Brothers productions, and the last of which was Love Without End (61), the most recent SB film I've investigated. Exploring these kind of works are proving that there's a lot more to some of the SB material out there than the B-movie nonsense more worth it for the amazing visual appeal. It's apparent that through some more straight dramatization in story and acting craft, there are some SB that become fairly compelling.
Love Without End featured a few filmmaking elements that really surprised me. The first was the use of slow motion to change scenes, something I don't remember ever seeing in any films of this nature. I had to reverse and rewatch the scene, it was that strange to me. Another aspect that was interesting and seems unique to me was the use of a split screen during a phone conversation. It's more likely I've seen this done in other such films, but still it also seemed a bit unusual. The slow motion still confounds me though.
Linda Lin Dai didn't live to the age of 30. She committed suicide by pill over so-called "family trivials" in 64.
Link to the end of the world:
and, view the Ming Wong soul-annihilating collection of photos of bygone SB and other asian film theatres in his
Filem-Filem-Filem
