Long Live the Mistress!

Long Live the Mistress! (1947)

太太萬歲

A man who becomes wealthy starts to have an affair and though his wife knows of it, she says nothing. Soon, the affair starts to have consequences and his business falls apart while the man’s sister starts to have a relationship with the brother of his wife.

Date of release
1947-11-30
TMDB
7.5 / 10 (6)
Runtime
1h 48m
Genres
Comedy, Drama, Romance
Director
Sang Hu

Casting

Interesting facts

Long Live the Missus! is a 1947 Chinese romantic comedy film known as one of the best comedies of the civil war era. The film was directed by Sang Hu with a screenplay written by the famous Chinese literary figure Eileen Chang; the pair also collaborated on the 1947 film Unending Love. The film was produced in Shanghai by the Wenhua Film Company. Long Live the Missus! offers a satirical depiction of the lives of women, male-female relationships, and the institution of marriage in 1940s Shanghai.

Production

Eileen Chang (Zhang AiLing (张爱玲)) was already a well-known essayist and novelist in China before entering the film industry. She became a screenwriter because she was “blacklisted from publishing after Japan’s defeat" due to her relationship with the top collaborationist official Hu Lancheng.

As film scripts were rarely written by women in this period or even in early Chinese film history, and as the only surviving script of the two that Chang wrote that year, Long Live the Missus! embodies the "role of female creators in the anti-film mechanism of 'male gaze' and the 'female writing' against the symbolization of women".

Sizhen's choice to reconcile with Zhiyuan might be seen as controversial, especially because the "women's question" was at the forefront of the discussion during the Republican Era. Sizhen is not portrayed as the strong female lead who advocates for her independence and pursues love. Just as Eileen Chang said, "I did not affirm or protect Chen Sizhen.

The themes and subjects of Long Live the Missus! are similar to those of Chang's wartime writings like Love in a Fallen City looking at the private space of love, marriage, family, and domestic conflicts. Long Live the Missus! integrates the Hollywood style comedy of “pursuit of happiness”, Chinese traditional love stories, and tragic romance that involves courtship, marriage, and threats of divorce.

Director Sang Hu considerably lightened the tone of Eileen Chang's original script of the film. Chang's original intention for the film was to create a more humanist film, affirming basic human nature in the form of a "silent drama." However, to ensure its box office success, the film was made to be a "Hollywood-style comedy with coincidences and witty dialogues."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended