When I watched the Shaw film Ambitious Kung Fu Girl the other day I wrote that I thought it might have been a more interesting film if they had made it a Chinese opera with the characters singing the dialogue - and then coincidentally I watch this Shaw film and it surprisingly turns into a Chinese opera (huangmei diao) about a quarter of the way in. I wasn't expecting that at all but it is such a half hearted effort I don't know why they bothered.  It is a murder mystery of sorts - like a period Perry Mason case. The Case of the Midnight Murder. Or the Case of the Lamenting Lady. Every now and then the characters pop into a song but the vast majority of the film is just spoken dialogue. Just a note of interest - the singing vocals are by Ivy Ling-po who sang for many of these films even when she wasn't in them. The film is overall a dull affair without either great music or much excitement. It just slogs along. I had hopes that it was going to turn into a revengeful ghost story but no such luck. They should have asked me.


By 1967 the huangmei diao had its best days behind it. They had originally come from the Communist Mainland who considered them  politically correct - extolling good traditional values. When Hong Kong made them after a few popular Mainland films at the box office,  they introduced a sweeter pop sound but they were still always period films often about China's past glories. From 1957 with Diau Charn to the mid 60's this genre was very popular but by this time other genres such as Wuxia, Western style musicals and spy films had overtaken them in popularity. The genre only had one last great gasp left when it produced The Dream of the Red Chamber in 1977.



This is directed by Ho Meng-hua who is familiar to most Hong Kong film fans for his wonderfully trashy films like The Kiss of Death, The Flying Guillotine, Black Magic, Oily Maniac and Vengeful Beauty - but those were all made in the 1970s. Before that he was just a director who took assignments for every genre that came along - The Lady Hermit, The Lady of Steel, Killer Darts in the martial arts genre, fantasy with The Monkey Goes West and Princess Iron Fan and even two other operas - The Adulteress and A Maid from Heaven. But what he rarely made was a boring film but he manages to here.



In a wealthy household there is a fair amount of enmity between the mother-in-law and her daughter towards the new wife of the son. When the daughter is murdered, Yan-niang (Pat Ting-hung) is caught with the murder weapon in her hand and the dear old mother-in-law (Kao Pao-shu) immediately accuses her of being the killer and her weak-willed son (Chin Han) just mumbles and doesn't defend his wife. The judicial system rushes a judgement through - guilty - execution scheduled. All seems lost till an honest official doubts the verdict and turns into a detective and her advocate in the court. The audience knows who the killer is right from the start - so no suspense regarding that but watching the Magistrate track him down has some interest. And just like Mason did many times, he fools the guilty party with the old corpse pointing at him trick. Works every time. In the film also is Ku Feng as the watchman, Shen Yi as the prostitute, Lee Kwan as the good for nothing and Chiang Kuang-chao as the policeman.