Wang Yin is a primary school teacher but is not teaching because
of an illness, so his daughter, Jeanette Lin Cui, who's only a high
school graduate, fills in for him. Her boyfriend, Kelly Lai Chen, is
interning for medical school and arranges for her father to see a
doctor. At first, Lin Cui doesn't like teaching, but it grows on her
after her father demonstrates that the students teach the teacher as
much as the reverse. Sammo Hung, under the name Zhu Yuanlong, plays an
underfed, skinny(!) student, and has a decent amount of screen time
throughout the picture in what is actually his film debut(!). Wang Yin
played Lin Cui's father in A Story of Three Loves, and played Lucilla
You Min's father in both Her Tender Heart and Father Takes a Bride. He
directed 41 films and acted in 63. He's a solid actor. I had seen Zhu
Mu, who plays Sammo's father, as the lead thug in Dreams Come True, as
the army commander in Sun, Moon and Star, and as the fur trapper Tiger
Zeng who wants to marry Julie Yeh Feng in the Shaw Brothers film The
Shepherd Girl.
Lin Cui isn't one of my favorite Cathay actresses, and this is not
among my favorite Cathay films, but she is particularly good in this.
Maybe it's because the role is so atypical: she gets to display a
completely different set of emotions than she does in virtually all her
other films. Spunky, perky, and athletic are not the adjectives that
describe her here. Instead, conciliatory, tearful, and empathetic are
words that come to mind. The film is rather schematic and preachy with
regards to education, but some good melodrama is to be had in the last
half hour.
The first copy of this DVD I got would not play at all. The second was
hard to cue up, and stopped and jumped about 15 times during the first
30 minutes and stopped repeatedly during the last 2 minutes. I had to get
a VCD copy of the film to view the last 2 minutes. Yep, I'm dedicated.
Reviewer Score: 5
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