A Little Chung Ching to Chase Away those Winter Blues

I'm definitely starting to feel a little depressed now that the days are getting shorter, the skies greyer, and the air colder. With a rainstorm on the way, all I want to do is crawl under my comforter and sleep for a long, long time.

Then I remembered this bright and cheery Chung Ching pinup that Oldflames sent me back in June. It's just the tonic for turning my sad into glad!

Treasures from the People's Republic of YouTube

Here are some truly rare treasures that I recently discovered on YouTube. None of these films are available on VCD or DVD, and it's very likely that they never will be.


Grace Chang in Girl with a Thousand Guises (1959)
As this clip delightfully shows, Girl with a Thousand Guises was a vehicle for the singing and dancing talents of Grace Chang. In the film she plays two roles, one of which is an aspiring actress. Evidently, the story features many parallels with Grace's real life, like auditioning for the movies behind her family's back.


Chung Ching in Songs of the Peach Blossom River (1956)
This is the film that established Chung Ching as a major star and set the trend for Hong Kong musicals in the late 50s. "Silver Voice" Yao Lee provides Chung Ching's singing voice, as she would do in many subsequent films.


Jeanette Lin Tsui in Girl in Disguise (1956)
This remake of a popular 1936 Shanghai film was Lin Tsui's third film. She plays a young lady forced to disguise herself as a man because her father, ashamed of not producing a male heir, has been lying been to gramps about her sex ever since she was born.


Grace Ting Ning in Mischievous Girl (1959)
This is Ting Ning's third film. With this one exception, she worked exclusively with Shaw Brothers from 1958 until her retirement in 1963. Her singing voice is provided here by the ubiquitous Yao Lee.

A Little More Chung Ching

After reading Dev's comment (on my previous entry) that Chung Ching is "the finest 'pin-up' girl of Hong Kong Cinema" — with which I couldn't agree more! — I decided that I ought to post a pin-up of her so you all can see what we're talking about.

I also wanted to post a clip from The Magic Lamp (1964), the only one of Chung Ching's films currently available on DVD. She has a very small role as a school bully. It's not typical of the roles that made her famous, but at least you can feel a little bit of the "heat" that made her such a sexy star.

Chung Ching Movie Flyer Fiesta

Who Isn't Romantic? (1956)

I really love these movie flyers—and not just because of the way that Chung Ching strikes a pose. These flyers are also fine examples of the two-color printing process that was frequently used in the 1950s and 60s.

At first, movie flyers were just printed in black and white. Then theaters started using a single color, like red or green, instead of black, which gave the flyer a brighter, more appealing look. Although full-color printing was cost prohibitive, the creative use of two colors could result in an eye-catching design not possible with one color. Notice how the two colors are used to create the foreground of the flyer. The designs were usually collaged from publicity photos and then photoengraved for printing. I don't know whether the designers worked at the production company, the distributor, the theater, or the local printer. But I do know that, whoever they were, these unknown artists helped create a popular art form that has transcended its original, short-term commercial function. Furthermore, in cases where a movie no longer survives, flyers are sometimes the only remaining visual and historical record of a lost film.

I hope you enjoy these Chung Ching movie flyers. Be sure to click for a larger version. All of them, except the last one, were printed by Nanyang Printers Ltd of Singapore.


Love Fiesta (1957)


Love at First Sight (1958)


The Mermaid (1959)


Sweet as a Melon (1956), click here to see what's inside.

References
Ho Ying Lung. "Handbills and Their Values". Hong Kong Film Archive Treasures: An Exhibition.

Chung Ching: Goddess of the Silver Screen

I'm not sure when I became a devotee of Chung Ching (Zhong Qing), but she is now, along with Bai Guang, one of my favorite Hong Kong movie actresses whose movies I am tragically unable to see. She does appear very briefly in the MP&GI huangmei opera The Magic Lamp (1964), which is available on DVD, but if you want to see one of the many musicals that made her a star in the mid to late 1950s, you'll need to buck down for a flight to Hong Kong and visit the HKFA.

So imagine my absolute delight when I flipped through the pages of an October 1954 issue of The Young Companion that I recently bought because it featured on its cover a very young Lin Dai (long before she became Shaw Brothers' reigning movie queen) and was surprised instead by this deliciously literal depiction of Chung Ching as goddess!

Shaw's Lost Era (1958-61)

Don't get me wrong, I've been just as excited as every other Hong Kong movie fan about the recent restoration and release of the Shaw Brothers Film Library, but I can't hide my disappointment about the dearth of films from the studio's early years. According to The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study, the first Shaw Brothers film was The Magic Touch, starring Betty Loh Tih and King Hu. It premiered on December 4, 1958 and was followed on December 31 by the Cantonese production, Sweet Girl in Terror, starring Patricia Lam Fung and Cheung Ying-Choi. Yes, that's right... Shaw Brothers made Cantonese films... at least until 1963. But you wouldn't necessarily know this, because ZERO of their Cantonese films were restored and released on DVD. I have heard this was because none of these films survived in the Shaw Brothers library, but I don't know for sure. Whatever the reason, it's a real shame. The same goes for all the Mandarin films from 1958 to 1961 that are missing in action. Of the 91 films released by the studio during that period (51 Mandarin, 39 Cantonese, and 1 featuring both dialects), only 5 are available on DVD. That's a huge loss. While most of the early Shaw films may never be seen again, at least traces of them have survived in the pages of Southern Screen, the studio's publicity magazine. In the coming weeks, I'm planning on digging through the few issues that I own and posting items about the films and stars from this lost era.

The early issues of Southern Screen are not easy to come by and are subject to highly competitive bidding on eBay. Fortunately, you can get a taste of the early years of Shaw Brothers from two wonderful Flash slideshows, which are featured as issues of the online tofu-magazine. Here are direct links. Once the video has loaded, click on the right hand side of the window to advance to the next screen.

mini-tofu #10
SOUTHERN SCREEN: A Shaw Brothers' pictorial part 1
features covers and photos from Southern Screen Nos. 1-17
(December 1957 through July 1959)

mini-tofu #11
SOUTHERN SCREEN: A Shaw Brothers' pictorial part 2
features covers and photos from Southern Screen Nos. 40-52
(June 1961 through June 1962)

Enjoy!

BTW, the cover of Southern Screen No. 3 shown above features "Little Wildcat" Chung Ching, who made movies for Shaws and Sons before that studio and many of its stars were incorporated into the newly founded Shaw Brothers company.