Four months after her suicide on July 17, 1964, Shaw Brothers released Beyond the Great Wall, Lin Dai's final collaboration with director Li Han-hsiang. Production on the film had actually begun as early as 1960 (see the February issue of Southern Screen) and by the end of the year an advertising poster had even appeared on the back of Southern Screen (November), but because of interruptions from other Shaw productions, Beyond the Great Wall took a long time to complete and wasn't publicly shown until November 1964. By that time, Linda was dead and Li had already left Shaw to establish his own film company in Taiwan. It was eleven years earlier that the both of them had made their respective debuts as actress and director with Singing under the Moon (1953).
In 1951 Linda — just 16 years old — was discovered and offered a contract by Yuen Yang-an, co-founder of the progressive film company Great Wall. Unfortunately, she soon found herself in the midst of the political divide afflicting Hong Kong's movie industry. When it became known that Linda's father had been a big player in the recently defeated Nationalist government, she was blacklisted by Great Wall's communist faction. Although she was already estranged from her father (Linda's parents had divorced when she was a child), she was compelled to write a confession denouncing him. Even so, the studio's directors were still afraid to offer her a role in their films. When Linda subsequently refused to renew her contract, the hardliners threatened her with a large debt, citing the money already spent on her wardrobe and publicity photographs. She protested by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Linda was discovered in time, and ironically her attempted suicide might have helped catapult her to stardom. Her name was splashed all over the papers and magazines, alerting the public and the government to the revolutionary activism breeding in Hong Kong's film studios.
As a result of this incident, nearly a dozen leftist film workers were expelled from the colony in January 1952 and Linda was released from her obligation to the studio, as was fellow Great Wall star Yan Jun, who had recently begun an affair with her.
Yan Jun was determined to make Linda a star, and when he joined the Yung Hwa film company later that year he insisted on bringing her with him. Their first collaboration — and Linda's screen debut — was Singing under the Moon (1953), an adaptation of Shen Congwen's novel Border Town, a tragic coming-of-age story about an orphaned teenage girl and her elderly grandfather. Linda stars as the main character Cui Cui and Yan Jun plays dual roles as the grandfather and the younger of two brothers who both fall in love with her.
Although Yan Jun was ostensibly the director of the film, the novice screenwriter Li Han-hsiang, who had been hired as deputy director, ended up directing the film because Yan was so busy in front of the camera. In this way, Singing under the Moon also became Li's debut. The film proved to be a huge success and launched the career of one of Hong Kong's greatest actresses as well as one of its greatest directors.
Although Singing under the Moon is cited as no longer available by the Hong Kong Film Archive in the notes for their 2009 retrospective (The Legend & The Beauty — The Films of Lin Dai), clips from the film have miraculously shown up on YouTube, affording us a rare glimpse of the humble beginnings of Hong Kong's movie queen. Linda's performance in the scene below shows that her popularity was due not only to her natural charm but also to Chinese audiences' perennial love for the sassy girl-next-door type. Hopefully we will one day be able to see the entire film in a manner befitting its landmark status.
References
- An Age of Idealism: Great Wall & Feng Huang Days (2001) by Hong Kong Film Archive
- The Age of Shanghainese Pops (2001) by Wong Kee Chee
- Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Twentieth Century (2003) by Lily Xiao Hong Lee
- Li Han-hsiang, Storyteller (2007) by Hong Kong Film Archive
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