105. Song At Midnight (Ye Ban Ge Sheng) (1937)

Directed By Ma-Xu Wei Bang

Synopsis

A theatre group comes upon a theatre in pretty bad shape, one of the singers befriends Song Danping, a Phantom Of The Opera-like character who teaches him how to sing and tells him his horrible story of disfigurement and lost love. In the end, Song asks the young actor to take is place in his ex-lover's affections attempting to relive his love vicariously in what is one of the sickest love stories in 30's cinema.

Review

Firstly it is probably worth learning Chinese if you want to watch this film with any level of understanding. The review I am making here is based on my poor attempts at deducting what is meant from the terrible Engrish of the subtitles. Still, it was enough to get a general grasp of the film, but it is damn distracting. Actor becomes dramaor and rope cordage in this Joycean oddyssey (yes the double d is intentional, see it's a literary pun).

Other than that it is quite sad to see the state of conservation in which the film has survived, both the sound and image are poor indeed as is the subtitling so it is a merit of the film that it managed to interest me for 2 hours. If you want to imagine this film, mash up Eisenstein, Chinese theatre, German expressionist horror, Chinese revolutionary ideology and Universal horror films and you'll have an idea. No? You'll have to watch it then. One thing I can say for sure, it is infinitely better than the Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera, the relationships between the characters are much more complex to the point of weird, the Phantom is a much more sympathetic character and the hero of the whole thing in the end and the insights of the backstory of Song are also pretty amazing, the Phantom ends up haunted by his former love who lives as a ghost herself. The actor ends up haunted by a haunted spirit, in the end it is resolved and the actor ends up with Song's former lover...as Song would have wanted it weirdly enough.

A film which really deserved better treatment, it seems like there's gonna be a version on DVD from the States, now you can get them from Hong-Kong on eBay with it's innovative torture/subtitling.

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

As a truly obscure film there is practically no info on it, I can however give you the names of the main actors: Menghe Gu, Ping Hu, Shan Jin, Chao Shi, Wenzhu Zhou

There!

M. Ward, Chinese Translation: