Race, Religion and Whaling : Down to the Sea in Ships

Down to the Sea in Ships (1922, Elmer Clifton) is famous because it made Clara Bow a star, but it's even more interesting as a semi-historical document.  It's also a surprisngly subversive commentary on race, religion and hypocrisy.

When this film was made whaling in tall ships was still an important industry, and many of the shots are authentic, shot with local whalers, who still practised their trade. This film is much more than a movie. The plot is melodrama, but plays out against a background which would be impossible to replicate today.  Though the story is set in the mid-nineteenth century (the Gold Rush is news), those times were living memory to many people 100 years ago. Just as Nosferatu (1921 - read more here) depicts a Germany of the recent past which was soon to vanish, So when we look at the whalers in their small boats, struggling with the ocean, we aren't watching stunt men, but men who really did know how to ride the waves.  There are shots where we can see whole herds of whales, and porpoises, swimming freely. Possibly not so easy to envisage today.  Down to the Sea in Ships is like a last, loving snapshot of a world we might reconstruct but can never experience. The best scenes, shot on the high seas, are grainy and not posed for dramatic effect, but they were made when motion picture technology was barely 25 years old.  Special credits then, to the two photographers, A G Penrod and Paul H Allen, "who, in small boats, stood by their cameras, at the risk of their lives, to film the fighting whales".  But there's even more to this film than meets the eye: its sub-texts on social issues are way ahead of its time. 

Down to the Sea in Ships was made by "The Whaling Film Corporation", specially set up for the purpose and shot in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the premiere took place. At the time, cinema wasn't dominated by big studios but by small independents, so this film is also a record of a film making model completely different to Hollywood, much closer to European art film of the period.  The director/producer was Elmer Clifton (1890-1949) who worked with D W Griffith, though in this film he shows a very different approach to movie-making.  

This film is not studio spectacular but direct engagement with Nature.  Nowadays there'd be warnings that "no real animals were harmed in filming". Not so in 1922. The massive sperm whale the whalers kill was probably a real whale.  No way the technology of the time was fancy enough to fake a whale like this. It fights back, flipping over one of the boats. The men fall into the sea but look as though they've done that before.  When the whale pulls three boats and their crews (weighing 6000 tons the subtitles tell us) the whale wasn't acting.  There are shots of blubber being stripped off the carcass, buckets filled with sperm and so on, lovingly captured in detail.  Presumably that's what happened : the whalers had to make a living and weren't paid much by the film company.  So if the filming is grainy, and the shots unposed, without the special effects we expect today, we shouldn't complain.  Although some scenes are clearly staged, technology of the time wasn't advanced enough to fake all that we see. The whaling ship, with three masts and nine sails, was almost certainly authentic. As the credits say "The brawny boatsteerer still throws the hand harpoon".  Though the hero is cast as boatsteerer, the man doing the job was evidently the real thing. 

It's interesting, then, hat the close knit community depicted is staunchly Quaker, though Quakers eschew killing.  I had a hard time squaring that with hunting whales almost to extinction, but I guess that's because we live in more enlightened times and don't depend on whales for fuel, bones and oil.  Quakers were whalers for economic reasons.  Captain Morgan is a retired whaleman, ramrod straight and unbending, and rich.  A bit of a tyrant too, who insists his daughter Patience cannot marry outside the faith or profession.  He's so uptight he complains that Patience's wedding shawl is "gay" because it has a fringe.  Being pig-headed is his downfall, though he doesn't live to find out.  For he's easily fooled.  Two men plot to steal his ships. One is Finner, a ne'er do well, the other is Siggs, from a "nearby city".

Siggs is seen dressed in Chinese clothes with Chinese antiques.  "You're almost white" says Finner.   Down to the sea in Ships is a whole lot less innocent than you'd expect.  Although race laws prevailed in the United States and elsewhere, not everyone was racist. Please see my piece  Broken Blossoms : Racist reversal the 1919  film by D W Griffith, Clifton's mentor, which subverts racist stereotypes and was banned in British colonies for fifty years as a result.  Griffith's Birth of a Nation presented the KKK in a good light, demeaning their victims.  But Clifton, who never made it big in Hollywood,  went on to make low-budget independent movies on difficult social issues. As in Broken Blossoms, and other films on race relations like The Cheat : racism and dishonesty (read more here)  fiendish orientals are defined as sex-obsessed maniacs, lusting for white women. The actor playing Siggs leers and grimaces, like a masked demon.  All Siggs has to do to pass as Quaker is wear a Quaker hat and talk thee and thou.  Is he mixed race, (in the 1850's) or is his race a ruse to justify titilliation? .And, in this film,  Finner is even more of a lecher, salivating over Dot,  Morgan's pre-pubescent  orphan granddaughter.  Later he attempts to rape her. (Dot and Finner in the photo below)

Dot is played by Clara Bow then aged 16 and chubby faced.  Captain Morgan cannot understand Dot, who was found floating on a raft when her parents' ship,went down.  Maybe she's not his at all.  She's a forceful whirlwind of a girl, more tomboy than lady, who hangs out with the labourers at the copper works and shamelessly pulls Jimmy's newly grown whiskers. Grandad grew rich from killing animals. Dot confronts men who tease a dog. She gets into fights. Eventually, she dresses as a boy to run off to sea when Jimmy signs on as a whaler.  Bow plays the part so well that she steals the show: the other actors are wooden in comparison.  And what a part it is, so unusual and so daring for its time.  Her more famous It Girl roles are tame stereotypes in comparison.

Patience is a wimp, who still plays with dolls, though she's at least in her 20's.  Siggs prevails on Captain Morgan, who,lets him court Patience. But Dexter, the Boy Next Door, returns from college and he and Patience fall in love. Finner gets Dexter shanghai'd on a whaling ship. Unfortunate term, given the racism in the depiction of Siggs, but a reminder that white men got screwed by a brutal system too.   Finner kills the master of the ship and takes control.  Dot, dressed as a cabin boy defends Jimmy when Finner fights him, and reveal she's a girl.  Finner gets caught molesting her and is locked in a cage. Dexter ends up becoming Boatsteerer, having earned the respect of the crew.  Having caught the big sperm whale (more innuemdo) the ship sails back to New Bedford. That very day, Patience is marrying Siggs, having promised her Dad on his deathbed to do so.  Dexter runs through a thunderstorm to the church, smashing a window, disrupting the ceremony and the decorum of Quaker propriety. Love prevails!  Next year Patience has a baby instead of a doll, and Dot cavorts in a flower strewn meadow with Jimmy. Along the way we see other vignettes of "real" life, like the Black ex-slaves of the Sea Islands, and Tacoma, Patience's First Nation maid, with an uncredited actress who clearly isn't white, and is dressed in Missionary Indian costume.

Brudeferden i Hardanger Fiddles and film

Tomorrow at the Aldeburgh Music Festival is Hardanger Fiddle Day. Julian Anderson's Ring Dance for two violins (1987) will be heard at the Jubilee Hall, together with pieces played by Hardanger fiddle master Sivert Holmen.  The Hardanger tradition comes from the mountains of western Norway.  In rural areas, social occasions like weddings  brought isolated communities together,  thus helped shape regional culture. Hardanger fiddlers played for dances: thus the strong rhythmic beat and repeated patterns.  Hardanger music is joyful, even athletic - some forms of Norwegian dance resemble acrobatics. Yet Hardanger music is also plaintive, with an overlay of keening melancholy. 

That curious blend of youthful vigour and sorrow pervades Brudeferden  i Hardanger, a film from 1926, directed by Rasmus Breistein, who was himself a country fiddler and later learned the Hardanger style. The film is based on at least one novel, but also explicitly connects to one of the most famous paintings in Norwegian art, Brudeferd i Hardanger, (1848) by Tidemand and Gude. The painting shows a boat sailing down a fjord, surrounded by mountains. On the boat is a bride leaving home for a supposedly happy future.  In the film, there's a shot in the film which almost exactly replicates the painting.  Presumably those who watched the movie made the connection.

Breistein's film, though, starts out first with another scene in which a boat carries a family, forced by poverty to emigrate. Marit refuses to go with her parents, but runs up the mountainside, watching the ship head out to sea. The family look back, grimly, at the mountains, not knowing what will lie ahead. Marit stays because she's secretly in love with Anders. Anders is leaving, too, but gives Marit his mother's Sølje, a traditional wedding brooch.  She assumes he'll marry her but four years pass without a word.

Next we see a bridal procession, the Brudeferd. The soundtrack, added when the film was restored, features Hardanger fiddle played by a named master, though otherwise the music is mostly Grieg.  It's a big wedding, with at least a dozen boats, being rowed down the fjord, fancier than in the painting. The bride is rich, wearing a jewelled crown, and elaborate traditional dress. Wonderful shots of the wedding party, with  the women in starched aprons and headresses.  Hardanger embroidery ? Hardanger fiddlers, of course. But who is the bridegroom ? Marit gets Anders alone and scolds him for marrying money.  Marit quits her job in the house of the judge and goes to work with a crofter in the mountains.  Loyal Tore, who has loved her all along, finds her and takes her back to Skjralte, his big farm in the valley.

Many years pass, and Marit is now a rich old widow. Look at her embroidered finery now !  She's still wearing Anders's mother's Sølje. But she's bitter, her mouth hard, like a scar.  Anders has fallen on hard times. His wife's money is gone, and the once rich bride is forced to peddle small goods to scrape a living.  Cruel Marit humiliates the woman, who eventually dies.  Fate, though, intervenes. Marit's daughter Eli falls in love with Anders's son Bérd. When her mother throws her out, she goes to live with him and old Anders in a humble hut. Another country dance, another Hardanger fiddler. Marit's son Vigleik gets drunk, goes to Anders's hovel and beats the old man up. Eli takes Anders back to Skjralte to recover, Vigliek flees to America, and Marit nurses Anders back to health.

The film is beautifully shot, lingering lovingly on things like spinning wheels, bucket making, rustic houses furnished sparsely, some with simple painting on on the walls. and the laying of hay to dry on branches set in the ground.  The acting is good, too, much better than in most silent film.  The restoration is so good that  details are given in full at the end, deservedly so.  Brudeferden i Hardanger is an even more beautifully made film than Troll-Elgen  (which I wrote about here) though Marit is an unsympathetic piece of work.  In the photo below, we can see the simple, portable cameras Breistein's crew used, shooting on location in the open countryside.

Silent Rosenkavalier bei Dr Caligari

A silent version of Der Roskenkavalier by the director of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. In 1926, Robert Wiene made a version of Der Rosenkavalier with the enthusiastic support of Richard Strauss himself. The film was screened at the Dresden Opera House, where the opera itself had premiered fifteen years before. It wasn't an "opera movie" in any modern sense of the word. 

The plot follows the novel from which Hugo von Hofmannsthal  derived the libretto, with extra scenes like the battlefield on which the Feldmarschall rides to victory and an opera bouffe in a small theatre, where the principals watch their dilemma being acted out. Obviously, the music for the opera would not fit. In any case, what would be the point in a silent movie? Instead Strauss wrote a new soundtrack, based on an orchestra of 17 parts, which mixed extracts from the opera with snippets from other works  including Arabella, Burleske, Till Eulenspeigel and  Also sprach Zarathustra. He  threw in bits of Wagner and Johann Strauss for further effect. Strauss himself conducted the blend live while the movie screened. How would today's opera snobs react?  They take themselves too seriously, methinks, because the Silent Rosenkavalier is a heady cocktail of good film and fun. It captures the savage satire while dressing it up with visuals so frothy they border on excess. This in itself is a dig at the materialistic culture that values frills, yet turns fresh young women into commodities in a cynical marriage marketplace. Swoon at the wigs and acres of lace, but this is no costume drama.

The technical film values are very high, as one would expect from the director of Dr Caligari (full download here) and Genuine the Vampire (more here). Scenes are carefully planned so they seem like tableaux in some elegant object of art, designed to distract from the grubbiness around it.  The Marschallin's boudoir suffocates in luxury: one imagines that any man kept like this would lose his masculinity. For all her wealth, the lady isn't happy. She sighs and uses exaggerated gestures and poses: Wiene is satirizing popular theatrical excess. Baron Ochs wears embroidered silks but is a boor. He somersaults, arms and legs akimbo like a broken puppet. Later, when Octavian challenges him to a duel, he collapses  though he's barely been scratched. The camera pans closeup on his face and then his mouth, wide as a grotesque sculpture. We can almost hear the screaming.

The scenes where the Men of Property and their lawyers work out the marriage contract are brilliantly done. Backgrounds dissolve into darkness, so the rococco filigree of the costumes and wigs frame faces whose features twist in angular contortion. Outside, in the garden, gigantic gryphons five metres high tower over the party goers. In contrast, the actress who plays Sophie expresses her personality with great sensitivity. Sometimes she looks like a nine year old, too naive to take in what's happening. Her jutting chin and turned up nose indicate her petulance.The rich folk cram into a tiny theatre in the Mehlmarkt to watch a play about "the Proud Father and his humiliation", narrated in rhyming folk poetry. The Marschallin plans a masked ball. Great crowd scenes. Mystery letters direct Octavian and the Field Marshal (straight from the battle) to meet a woman in the grotto of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. The last reel of the film is missing but the inconclusive ending isn't a problem. We know what's going to happen. the last frame shows the little black boy, with his plumed turban, drawing a curtain and gesturing silence.

Papageno in silhouette Reiniger 1935

More Weimar silhouettes from Lotte Reiniger, this time a ten-minute fantasy on Papageno, made in 1935 as part of her projected series "Silhouetten Opernhaus", the first of which was Zehn Minuten Mozart (1930). described by her as a "Schattenspile zu Meisterwerken der Tonkunst", animations that illustrated music.  Zehn Minuten Mozart brings together snippets from different works by Mozart to form a coy narrative which delights a Romantic imagination. Papageno is much more sophisticated, concentrating on Papageno and his relationship to nature.


The tighter focus allows Reiniger to create exceptionally elaborate silhouettes - look at  tracery of ferns and vines, which bring out  the delicate intricacy of the music perhaps in a way no staged performance can. Look at Papageno's bells at right . It's hard to believe they were crafted form cardboard. And enjoy the birds as they move and sing. Papageno is teaching them how to sing his name. When Papageno and Papagena sing of their future offspring, a stork pierces eggs and little children dressed as birds pop out.

Reiniger's silhouettes grew out of the old German tradition of Scherenschnitte. The figures could be photographed frame by frame so they could seem to dance on film.  Truly unique and magical, uniting ancient and modern. This is a film which echoes the designs of the 1930's yet feels true to Mozart and feels immortal. Becaause it was made with sound, we also get authentic period performance as soundtrack.

I've written about Lotte Reiniger before (see my piece Weimar animation on Reiniger's The Star of Bethlehem which gives links to the British Film Institute archive. Reiniger knew just about everyone in avant garde film circles, many of whom I've written about on this site (see Ruttman : Berlin, DieSinfonie der Grossstadt) Even when she had to stay out of Nazi Germany, she hung out with the likes of Renoir and Cocteau. Interestingly, the assistant she uses on this film is Arthur Neher. Any relation to Caspar Neher, whom she must have known from Brecht/Eisler circles?

Weimar animation - The Star of Bethlehem

Strikingly modern image - but it's from 1921  It comes from Lotte Reiniger's film The Star of Bethlehem originally made in Germany but best known in the version below, produced in 1953, using the Glyndebourne chorus,  though they aren't listed in the credits. In the early days of film, artists were experimenting with many new techniques, from short stop animations (Meliés, Segundo do Chomo ) to posed shots of insects (Wladyslaw Starewicz), light shows (Walther Ruttmann) and sophisticated fantasy (René Clair) so it was perhaps natural that Reiniger, who worked in avant garde film circles, should turn to the German art of Scherenschnitte which had thrived in the 18th and 19th century, before photography took hold.

Silhouettes and puppets bridge folk art and sophisticated commercial performance. As a child, Goethe had an elaborate toy theatre where he acted out dramas of his own creation.  Silhouettes, puppets and street theatre have roots not only in German culture but also in Turkish, Chinese and Indonesian Wayang. Thus Reiniger's use of Scherenschnitte fuses tradition and modernity, folk tradition and high tech art. .

Lotte Reiniger's Scherenschitte are beautifully executed - look at the lace tracery on the angel's wings - but she adapts the form so the figures move, and can be posed like puppets, and animated for film.  The figures are black, so you see only the outlines: you fill in the magic with your imagination. Early 20th century audiences would have connected the images in this film with silhouettes they'd known from their own childhoods and responded to the magic of memory. Twenty-first century audiences, bombarded with a multiplicity of styles, would do well to ponder the simplicity of Reiniger's art, which uses naive form in a highly sophisticated, non-naive way to recreate a sense of mystery and wonder.

Reiniger and her husband, Carl Koch, were both closely involved with Weimar left wing circles. In 1933, they left Grermany, settling first in France, reaching England in 1949. Reiniger left her archive to the British Film Institute which has released a 2 DVD set of her fairy films. Read more here about how they've been restoring the original The Star of Bethlehem, painstakingly removing the desiccated cellotape that held the cardboard joints in place while filming took place. They are also replacing the long sequence of flying devils which were "considered so scary that they were cut from the American release". Some things, alas, don't change. From the stills in the article quoted above, those demons seem a crucial part of the whole. So perhaps the version below will be replaced by something less sanitized. Also recommended, a documentary made about Reiniger in1970, which is well worth the rental price of £1.

First Shakespeare movie 1899

The first movie based on Shakepeare, 1899. Normally, we see only stills and read contemporary reports, but we don't often get a chance to see "real" acting and body movements. Herbert Beerbohm Tree was the foremost Shakepearean actor of his time and created the mould for Shakespearean staging in the first half of the 20th century. How stylized and formal this acting is!  Chances are, Shakespeare himself did things differently, but we'll never know. No movies in Shakespeare's time.

The Cheat 1915 - hypocrisy and dishonesty

Oriental Villain burns brand onto White Woman! Even today the subject would be sensitive. Racial prejudice, violence. Exotic, erotic aliens. The Cheat (1915) is shockingly prescient even now, a hundred years after the film was made. Modern audiences can't hide behind the illusion that things have really changed.

"Haka Arakau, a Burmese Ivory King to whom the Long Island smart-set is paying social tribute" is played by Sessue Hayakawa, (1889-1973) the first non-white to have a major film career. That in itself is telling. Not until Bruce Lee did Asians get to play important dramatic leads that didn't pander to stereotype. Arakau is seen using a Chinese incense burner to heat a branding tool to burn his seal onto ivory idols: the alien making his mark, in every sense. Because he's immensely wealthy, he doesn't get sidelined like nearly every other non-white in a era where race laws nullified reinforced prejudice. Arakau can switch from "oriental" to sophisticated western gentleman in elegant dinner jacket. He's threatening because he doesn't conform to stereotype.

Edith, a socialite, flirts with Arakau, even though inter-racial relations were illegal, and she's married as well. Not a nice lady. Her husband Richard teeters on the edge of bankruptcy but she can't stop spending wildly and showing off. She steals money from a Red Cross fund raiser to help her husband on a money making venture. Edith borrows from Arakau to cover the misappropriation, with the implication that she'll sleep with him in return.  She slips into the inner rooms of Arakau's home. There's a struggle. He coat slips off, revealing her naked shoulders. It's not very clear what's happening until Arakau grabs his branding iron and pushes it into her flesh. She falls to the ground: even then it's not completely clear how she feels. She doesn't scream, but gasps ambiguously. Then she picks up a gun and shoots him, also in his shoulder. Branding iron and gun: both symbols of sexual penetration.

Richard tells the police that he shot Arakau. The truth is too dangerous. The grid of the shoji screen is now reflected in the shadow of the bars in a prison cell. Edith, hardly in fear of being raped or attacked, goes to Arakau. He's reclining in bed, and she leans close to him. Note the hands that don't quite touch. She wants to bribe him to drop the case. "You can't cheat me twice", he says. "It's in the hands of the law". But he concurs with Richard's story. At last Edith is spurred to tell the truth. She rips her clothes off in front of the courtroom and displays her scar. This scene alone is quite shocking, given the proprieties of the time. Mayhem. The crowd attacks Arakau and Richard is freed. It's not very clear but Arakau seems to be arrested by the police. Better than than get lynched by the mob, I guess. Despite her duplicity, Edith is a "heroine". Who are the "cheats" here?

Apart from Hayakawa's dignified performance, the acting in this film is exaggerated, even by the standards of the time. Perhaps the direction is a further clue to meaning. Edith is the fake, Arakau has integrity even though he assumed she would sleep with him if she couldn't repay the loan. The director was Cecil B De Mille. Four years later, D W Griffiths made Broken Blossoms, on a similar theme of dishonesty, sexuality and racism, (read more here). Significantly, Griffiths used a white actor in yellowface for his later movie, defusing some of the impact.  De Mille couldn't confront racism head-on, but disguised it under a story audiences then - and now - take at face value. How modern audiences read The Cheat tells us a loit about racism today. Some will assume that Arakau gets what he deserves, since he's a foreigner and doesn't "know his place". Others will read the film as something much more disturbing and brutally honest.

Si j'etais blanche

"I'd like to be white. It would give me such joy if my breasts and thighs changed colour". Listen to the full song HERE. Immediately, Josephine Baker gets to the nub of what white folks thought of blacks.  Read this excellent analysis of the song by Anna Biller here. Even the dolls little girls play with enforce the idea that white is the only way to be. "Et je disais à l’air accablé, me croyant toute seule brune au monde". But as Anna Biller points out, the girl in the song subtly turns things round in her own favour

Josephine Baker confronted assumptions about race, class and orientation. In the photo, she's wearing her famous banana outfit which of course moved tantalizingly as she danced. Note the fingers pointing and the banana imagery! The show was set in a fake jungle, a metaphor for the Dark Continent where forbidden, erotic things happen, and white people don't really rule. What a frisson fancy Paris society would have felt as she gyrated on stage while they sat, "civilized" in starched tight collars.

Josephine Baker was part of the cultural revolution that reached Europe from the mid 19th century. Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes, Pierre Loti, the  Impressionists, Debussy, Ravel, Picasso and his friends collecting African art.  (British colonialism was very different). Non-western cultures showed Europeans that other forms of experience were valid. Without non-western cultures, the west might not have become "modern". The whole imperialist world model we're supposed to follow is upside down.

There's perhaps more on this site than most elsewhere on the dialogue between western and non western cultures. Lots on non western culture and on cross-culture issues and stereotypes, particularly as expressed in music and early film). For example, see this, a proper Cantonese opera but a satire on Viennese operetta !

Below is Josephine Baker dancing in 1927. So energetic, so angular, nothing like the way white women danced then. Nor like black American women either, I suspect, who were finding their own way ahead (see my post on Within Our Gates ). But the spirit of the Jazz Age freed up inhibitions and let people express themselves in new ways.  It's no coincidence that the best book about Josephine Baker was written by Patrick O'Connor, the music critic whose speciality was French music and opera. He was too secure to need to sneer at crossover. How the horizons of music writing have narrowed since he's been gone. (read more about him here).

Street Angel 馬路天使 1937 - iconic Chinese Weimar

Street Angel (Malu Tienshi) (馬路天使, 1937) is  one of the best-loved Chinese movies of all times. It's "Chinese Weimar" in the sense that it's an art film but deals with social issues. In China, film played a crucial role in modernization. Film could reach ordinary people, and show things more directly than words might do. It's perhaps the best known Chinese film of its era in the west, where its full significance is perhaps lost.  It's certainly not a comedy as some western observers assume. There's also much more to it than love story ! It deals with bad social conditions, in which people are exploited, a metaphor for the fate of China at the time. The hit song itself has a message : when will peace and happiness return ?

It's also an icon because the star, Zhou Xuan (1918?-1957), was one of the great actresses and singers of her time - Monroe, Garbo, Dietrich all in one person, but still, in  Chinese circles revered for what she did and represented.  This was the film that launched her career. Here, she's barely past puberty, but what presence and sweetness! Later she became a diva, but her life was tragic and she died young, which adds to the mystique of this early film. The songs, too, are important. Though they were composed by Hu Leting, via the medium of film they became embedded so deeply into public consciousness that even today the songs are still hits, sung by popstars. Not so different from Heidenroeslien, which many people think of as "folksong" though it's Goethe and Schubert. These songs are beautiful, but they appeal, too, because they evoked an idealized past and nostalgic innocence.

Although there are subtitles to this film, I can't get them to work. But there's a very good translation HERE which you can use. It's good because it explains some of the background. When the people in the film discuss Mexican dollars, they're referring not only to the currency imposed (not by Mexico) in the 19th century but also to foreign control

Nonetheless, Street Angel is fundamentally a story about ordinary simple people and the way they deal with the problems of life. Zhou Xuan plays a very young girl who's perhaps been bought as a child to be trained to make money for the old musician. Her older "sister" (not a real sister, but that's what people called each other) has ended up a prostitute. The implication is that's what's going to happen to sweet little Xiao Hong (which means "Little Red"). Traditional values, perhaps, but the movie is reminding the audience, it's not a good thing, and maybe you don't have to sell yourself to get by.

The "hero" Xiao Dan, is Chen Shaoping, the trumpeter. Significantly, he plays the western trumpet in the kind of band that was common in China until fairly recently. These bands used to play at funerals, weddings, shop openings etc marching in the streets, playing a combination of Chinese and western tunes on a combination of western and Chinese instruments. Until I was quite old I thought "Dixie" and "She'll be coming round the mountain" were Chinese tunes. So Chen's job symbolizes something. Xiao Hong gets her hair cut into a bob and moves in with Chen. Chen's a magician, too. Watch that sequence when he gets Xiao Hong pinned to a wall. Significantly, as the film progresses, the "real" Chen emerges. At home, out of the public eye, he plays an erh hu, a traditional folk instrument, which endears him to Xiao Hong a pure Chinese girl.

When Chen and friends help Xiao Hong to get away from the local thug, audiences would have understood the wider meaning: that people can stand up to corrupt society and find a better life. It's also a funny movie - watch the scene where Chen's trying to get business for his friend's barbershop, and who turns up? Bald monks! And then they shave the thug's enforcer, cutting his hair like a traditional baby which is real provocation.

The other characters also connect to other things. One of the men covers his walls with newsprint. That wasn't uncommon in those days when people were desperately poor, but it shows how deeply newspapers penetrated society and spread ideas long after they ceased to be "news". Ephemeral perhaps, but still valid. At the end, the film pans from the alleyway hovel, up over a wall and onto a shot of an idealized skyscraper. A symbol of modern progress, which happens in many films, including western movies of the time. But there's more to it.  The reference is to the scenes behind the opening credits (which include the bronze lions outside the original HSBC offices). Poor people like the ones in this film wouldn't in their wildest dreams go to places like these, so the introduction is a lot more significant than the usual "scenery" introductions that became common in later Chinese movies.

Shanghai was created as a result of the shameful Opium Wars. It became the world's biggest metropolis, with huge textile industries, and the centre of trade between China and the West, but its success was poisoned because it was controlled by foreign states who had "concessions" and extra territorial rights, imposed by military force. They were in China to exploit its resources but ultimately could not care less about the benefits to the country. So the enforced prostitution scenario, and the thgug's bullying, in Street Angel is very pointed indeed. That's the kick that makes this film a lot more than cute melodrama.

The film was made by Mingxing, the studios founded by Lai Man Wai "father of Chinese cinema. Read more about him HERE. The director, Yuan Muzhi, came from Ningpo, like the Shaw Brothers, but what different paths their careers would take. Threy ended up billionaires. Yuan, like trumpeter Chen, declared for the CCP in 1949. Zhou Xuan lived in Hong Kong for a while but became mentallyu ill, and died young.