Not Your Grandma's Cantonese Opera... Then Again, Maybe It Is

Several weeks ago, I posted about Chun Siu-lei, who introduced burlesque elements into Cantonese opera during the late 1940s and early 50s. After learning about her antics, the following scene from the sequel to Prince of Thieves (1958) suddenly made sense to me — well, as much sense as can possibly be made from the appearance in a Cantonese opera film of a silver-painted exotic dancer and a mummy bearing a magical apple!

Prince of Thieves wasn't your run-of-the-mill Cantonese opera movie. It was a remake of Ma Sze-Tsang's famous Westernized stage opera The Vagabond Prince, which was adapted from Douglas Fairbanks' Thief of Bagdad (1924) and first translated to the silver screen by Ma himself in 1939. As a matter of fact, Ma Sze-Tsang had met Fairbanks sometime in 1931-32, when Ma was engaged for an 18-month run at the Mandarin Theater in San Francisco. Perhaps it was his sojourn on Gold Mountain that "corrupted" him, but Ma fell in love with Hollywood movies and took it upon himself to modernize Chinese opera by incorporating Western elements. In 1934 he established the Chuen Kou [Global] Film Company with the help of overseas Chinese investors. The following year he made his first film, Scent of Wild Flowers (1935), a remake of the Sternberg-Dietrich classic The Blue Angel. His next film was Opera Stars and Song Girls (1935), which was modeled on Hollywood's backstage musicals. The film included an opera highlight performed in modern dress and also featured dancing girls in sexy costumes.

Later in his life, Ma Sze-Tsang criticized these early experiments and advocated a return to tradition. In 1955 he moved to the People's Republic of China with his wife, opera star Hung Sin-nui, and became head of an opera training school in Guangzhou, where he taught until his death in 1964.

Meanwhile, back in Hong Kong, the bastardization of Cantonese opera that Ma had pioneered was being continued by director Luk Bong with his remake of Prince of Thieves, starring Ho Fei-fan and Mui Yee. The film and subsequent sequel were so popular that Luk Bong was engaged by Shaw Brothers to make a series of similarly styled Occidentalist fantasies starring Patricia Lam Fung and Pearl Au Ka-wai: Glass Slippers (1960), The Talking Bird (1959), Ali Baba and the 40 Robbers (1960), and The Sleeping Beauty (1960).

Okay, okay... I know... you just want to see the silver dancer, the mummy, and the magic apple. Here you go...



References
Law Kar, "The American Connection in Early Hong Kong Cinema", The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (2002).