There is one song inextricably associated with Lin Dai — played so often that you either weep with sympathy or grimace in pain — and that song is Carrie Ku Mei's evergreen hit "Love without End" from the 1961 movie of the same name. Carrie wasn't the only singer who provided the vocals for Lin Dai in her films. Tsin Ting famously sang for Linda in the huang mei opera films Diau Charn (1958) and The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959).
It may come as a surprise then, as it did to me a few years ago, that Lin Dai was herself a singer of great note, if not great skill, and was a popular Pathé recording artist during the 1950s. However, as my buddy Dev Yang has written on his blog The Golden Age of Chinese Language Cinema, although Linda's singing lacks skill and sophistication, there is a genuine sincerity that is quite endearing.
Linda did not sing the songs in her debut film, Singing under the Moon (1953), however, in an odd turn of events, she ended up recording them for Pathé. The albums were a bit hit. In fact, Linda's version of the song "The Hot Blazing Sun" broke record sales set by renowned professional singers such as Yao Lee and Chang Loo.
Keen to continue Linda's success as a songstress, her mentor and lover Yan Jun made sure to include songs in the subsequent films they made together. Her second movie Humiliation for Sale (released in Singapore in 1954 but not in Hong Kong until 1958) included three songs. And her third, Spring Is in the Air (1954), incorporated the plot device of students preparing for a musical. It was a device that would be recycled in her later films, such as Merry-Go-Round (1956), a color extravaganza shot in Japan that includes a whopping ten songs and fantasy musical sequences with the all-girl Shochiku Revue.
While Spring Is in the Air is apparently unavailable (not even on YouTube), we can at least still hum along with the songs from the film, such as this delightful number, "Lovely Springtime". ((LISTEN))
The innocent Lin Dai we hear in this song would eventually lose her voice during her intensive commodification at Shaw Brothers — as they strove to create the ultimate and perfect movie queen.
Call me unsophisticated, but I'll take the thin-voiced Lin Dai of Spring Is in the Air over the ventriloquized Lin Dai of Love without End any day of the week!
* A very special thanks to Gilbert Jong for providing the above image from the movie booklet for Spring Is in the Air. Check out his fabulous collection of Lin Dai photos at his Flickr stream Enjoy Yourself Tonight.
References
- The Age of Shanghainese Pops (2001) by Wong Kee Chee
- "The Legend and the Beauty: Exhibition on Lin Dai" by Tong Kim-hung, Hong Kong Film Archive Newsletter, Issue 50 (November 2009)
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