The film:
A Chinese take on the screwball comedy, featuring an over-eager-to-please upper class housewife, her unreliable spouse, and a glamorous seductress in Civil War-era Shanghai. Shangguan Yunzhu steals the show as the homewrecker “Mimi,” as does Shi Hui as the hilarious Old Mr. Chen. The tightly-plotted screenplay is by Eileen Chang, one of modern China’s most celebrated writers and author of the story “Lust, Caution.” Shangguan Yunzhu also appears in Spring River Flows East (1937), Crows and Sparrows (1949) and (with her daughter, Yao Yao) in Wanderings of Three-Hairs the Orphan (1949).
Taitai wansui
Directed by Sang Hu 桑弧
Screenplay by Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing 張愛玲)
Studio: Wenhua Film Co.
Release date: December 13, 1947
Cast: Shangguan Yunzhu 上官雲珠, Shi Hui 石揮, Wang Yi 汪漪, Zhang Fa 張伐, Lu Shan 路珊, Jiang Tianliu 蔣天流, Han Fei 韓非
English subtitles translated by Christopher Rea
Learn more:
See the video lectures and other materials on the Long Live the Missus! (1947) module of the Chinese Film Classics online course.
Long Live the Missus! (1947) is discussed in chapter 10 of the book Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949.
Watch the first collaboration between director Sang Hu and screenwriter Eileen Chang: Love Everlasting (1947).
Watch the animated opening credits of Long Live the Missus!:
Watch Sizhen persuade her dad to lend her husband money:
Watch Sizhen foil a con artist’s extortion attempt:
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Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1929 (2021), by Christopher Rea
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2017/09/30-10/21: A Golden Age of Chinese Cinema, 1947-52, at BAMPFA
BAMPFA film series featuring seven films released in China between 1947 and 1952
Crows and Sparrows 烏鴉與麻雀 (1949)
An epochal film, produced and set at the end of civil war, centering on a fight over housing. Who will stay and who will go?
Wanderings of Three Hairs the Orphan 三毛流浪記 (1949)
Follows the misadventures of Sanmao as he tries to fill his belly on the streets of Shanghai. Adapted from the comic strip by Zhang Leping.
Spring River Flows East 一江春水向東流 (1947)
An epic melodrama in two parts. A dutiful wife struggles to keep her family together through eight years of war, only to suffer betrayal.
Love Everlasting 不了情 (1947)
A young professional woman is hired to care of the young daughter of a married man, only to find herself in an impossible position.
