Trapeze Girl
Director: Koh Nakahira
Year: 1967
Rating: 3.0
When I was a young child my parents took me to
the circus - Barnum & Bailey I think it was - and I hated it. All of
it. The animal tricks, the clowns but especially the high wire acts that
had me hiding my head in my hands in nervousness. I even avoid movies about
them - the John Wayne circus movie, Circus World, Burt Lancaster in Trapeze
and even the Marx Brothers in At the Circus. But I was enticed by a Shaw
Brother's film about the circus. Well never again. This may be the worst
Shaw Brother's film I have seen and I have seen some pretty bad ones. The
melodrama is badly overwrought and poorly stupidly scripted, the action choreography
is clumsy but it is how a rape is treated that really bothered me. A sign
though I suppose of how times have thankfully changed.
This is directed by Koh Nakahira, one of the Japanese talents that Shaw brought
over. He had a number of films in Japan behind him and later was to direct
two of the three Rica exploitation films. He was to only direct four films
for the Shaws and the other three - Diary of a Lady Killer, Summer Heat and
Inter-Pol are better than this one. But then what isn't? A slug in the face?
Maybe.
Tingyu (Fang Ying) comes from a poor family where she is the main breadwinner
for and that her father then gambles away. When the father impregnates the
neighborhood tramp and expects Tingyu to call her mother, she does the logical
thing and runs away to the circus in her dream of becoming a high wire trapeze
artist. She gets a job doing menial work but eventually the main trapeze
male artist played by Lo Lieh promises to help train her. Lo Lieh is a swine
in this one and does more grabbing her than grabbing the swings. Below an
ex-trapeze artist looks on - ex because his old partner was killed and he
can't do it any more. He is portrayed by Yueh Hua who is a lot more comfortable
in wuxia films than he is in this one. Eventually he takes on Tingyu to train
and love follows like a shadow.
The awful aspect though is the rape - Tingyu is raped with some surprising
nudity - body double I hope - and the woman who discovers her on the ground
tells her to hush up about it - Tingyu of course blames herself and the man
she loves blames her - smacks her a few times and walks away from her. Try
that in a film today. It was infuriating though I know that back then that
is often exactly how society acted. But it was honestly the last thing I
expected in this film and it left a sour taste in my mouth. I don't think
this did all that well at the box office.
I liked Fang Ying in Asia-Pol but she is pretty dreary here. She had a shortish
career at Shaw - she came up in their acting class of 1963 in which the ladies
were termed the Seven Fairies - they always gave them nicknames back then.
She was in a few big films but she married the heir to the Kee Wah Bakery
in 1968 and retired shortly afterwards. But later in life she came back to
film as a set designer and was responsible for some fine films - the Iceman
Cometh and Naked Killer among them.
