The Purple Shell
Director: Pan Lei
Rating: 4.0
Year: 1967
Two bad marriages
collide in this Shaw Brothers melodrama leaving behind the expected wreckage.
The film is shot very nicely, good interiors and excellent acting but it
was like dragging my bad leg through the mud. Slow and endless. It is as
old fashioned as a paper doily. As a Jane Austen novel but less happens.
The world and what passes for scandal has certainly changed since then. It
is directed by Pan Lei who was originally from Vietnam but after moving
to Taiwan he was able to get into the film business. The Shaw Brothers signed
him up in 1963 and he got off to a good start directing Lover's Rock in 1964
starring Cheng Pei-pei. Interesting in that the lead actress in this film
has a fleeting resemblance to Pei-pei. Pan primarily directed dramas - Love
Without End - but like most Shaw directors he had a go at martial arts films
as well - Purple Darts, The Fastest Sword and after leaving Shaw he directed
The Sword with Jimmy Wang-yu. Perhaps this worked well as a weepie back in
1967 but now the characters just irritate you with their passivity. You
want to give them a big kick.
Most of the actors in this are unknown
to me - primarily Taiwanese actors I believe which is where this was shot
- except for the lead man Ling Yun, who was also in fact a Taiwanese actor
recommended to Shaw by Pan Lei. He became a popular romantic leading man
and stayed with Shaw till the late 1970s. Ou Wei plays the other husband
with great malice and I was quite impressed by just how nasty he could be.
Turns out he too is a Taiwanese actor who had acted in a number of Taiwanese
dialect films before joining Shaw in 1964 with Lover's Rock. He won a few
Best Actor Awards but I can't think of any other film I recall him from.
He was to pass away in 1973 from kidney disease. And I also have no clue
who the lead actress is - Chiang Feng - who only made two films for Shaw
and primarily worked in Taiwan. She is quite good in this but again she has
no backbone at all. In a smaller part as a nightclub girl is Betty Ting-pei
very early on in her career.
At a boring dinner party Meng-Xuan (Ling
Yun) and Pei-qing (Chiang Feng) find themselves talking to each other. Both
have miserable marriages - hers to a total rotter (Ou Wei) and his to a
wife mainly interested in playing mahjong and spending his money. Men-Xuan
is wealthy - with a large house and of course the well furnished bar. In
all these Chinese houses there is a bar. I wish I had a bar even though I
don't drink or entertain.
They slowly - very slowly - drift towards
one another and fall in love - though you can't imagine why. They are both
as dull as a day stuck in a cardboard box. And they keep it strictly platonic.
Which is weird. He puts her in a lovely house but they still keep it clean.
Playing the long game. Not that this does them any good. They are photographed
walking through the woods holding hands and are blackmailed. Scandal! You
just want them to say screw you, so what - but back in 1964 I guess that
wasn't so easy. The film is based on a novel by Taiwanese author Chiung Yao.
Shaw had contracted for three of her books that became films - this
one, My Dream Boat amd Mist Over Dream Lake. She is also the author of Outside
the Window that was Brigitte Lin's debut film in Taiwan.
I believe that this Shaw film was never
released by Celestial but it is out there on the gray market if you want
to watch a long dreary film.
