Vintage Shanghai Comedy: “Da Li, Xiao Li & Lao Li 大李，小李和老李“

There are so many reasons to love this 1962 screwball comedy, our Historic Shanghai Film Club selection for February – let us count the ways:

Scenes of 1960s Shanghai. You think images of 1930s Shanghai are rare? Try 1962, the year the Great Leap Forward ended. This is a rare film documentation of the period, including what may be the only existing footage of the Art Deco slaughterhouse when it was still in use – from the (now vanished) Art Deco gates to the walk-in freezer. There are also rare interior shots of houses, shops, and street scenes. Indeed, so beloved is this film in Shanghai that in 2018, a group of well-known actors dubbed the film into Shanghainese.

Chinese history. Wrapped up in this comedy are all the messages of 1962 China, from the big, happy families of modest means, to the shiny-happy workers, and benevolent bosses. Everyone is happy and has enough.

It’s laugh-out-loud funny! Telling the tale of three workers at the slaughterhouse trying to adjust to the new physical education regimen at their factory .“The film’s ideological brilliance lies in its translation of the difficulty of assimilating revolutionary change into the bodily awkwardness of its characters,” [ie slapstick] says David Pendleton in a Harvard Film Archive review. Hilarious!

Director Xie Jin is a LEGEND. “One of the most remarkable artists in the history of the cinema of mainland China and, arguably, its most significant director,” says Pendleton. With a background in theater, his early successes came from being able to combine socialist content with melodrama. His 1950s and 60s films, including Women Basketball Player No. 5, focused on female protagonists who free themselves from feudal oppression through revolutionary struggle – in factories, battlefields, or basketball courts. Denounced during the Cultural Revolution, he was rehabilitated, returned to socialist content and melodrama, and in 1986 made Hibiscus Town, considered one of the masterpieces of Chinese cinema. “Da Li, Xiao Li, and Lao Li” is his only comedy.

REFERENCES

Anlan Li, “Restored Shanghai Dialect Classic Premieres During Film Festival,” Shanghai Daily, June 17 2018 https://www.shine.cn/news/metro/1806176652/

David Pendelton, “Xie Jin, Before and After the Cultural Revolution,” Harvard Film Archive accessed June 15 2018 https://library.harvard.edu/film/films/2016marmay/xie.html