Oh how I loved these old Cantonese movies! This is probably the oldest film I have in my collection, and the quality is quite honestly awful! If you know the quality of 40’s films already (or seen news clips from the war or something), then imagine that, but 10 times worst. It’s sound is awful too (and I'm not talking about your average bootleg either!), and without subtitles to help me, I had to put up with the rather echoed and distorted Cantonese, and I probably only recognized about 20% of dialog which I understand, so the rest I had to guess. Still it’s not all bad, though I almost didn’t review this as I can garentee that nobody will see this, and is probably one of those movies you will never in a million years be able to get your hands on…though to a certain extent that’s probably a good thing, but it’s on the database, so I thought why not.

The story, is basically your typical early romance film, with a hint of Chinese opera throughout, just like those old US musicals that most people would have seen some time, which is set in the present day (1940’s that is), but unfortunately due to the very poor sound I am not really able to shed much light on the actual story.

As for the acting, well it’s actually a lot better than some of the rubbish that comes out these days, especially from Lam Mui Mui, the most professional of actresses in early HK films, and Sit Gau Sin (although I’m not really familiar with most of his other work) was also pretty good. Chan Pei though, the director, didn’t impress me in this film at all, as a lot of the camera work especially was very poor (even taking into account equipment used back then), though some of his later films were pretty good.

As I said before, the sloppy filming, poor production (mostly editing) and poor sound is probably the worst I have ever seen in a film, and although just a few years later during the 50’s I have some pretty good films, it just seems that more could have been done to improve this. So as I can’t really compare this to other films at this time (as I don’t think I have seen another one done during or before the 40’s), then I can just compare it to some which were made a few years later, which may seem wrong in a way I suppose, but it’s all I can do, and I think this is probably a fair rating for what this is. Though it's probably a good thing that the whole film lasts little over 60 minutes.

[2/5]