A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
November 29, 1936
Original Title:
生死同心
Alternate Titles:
Life and Death
Shengsi tongxin
Genres:
Drama
Production Countries:
China
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 90
Probably the most sheerly entertaining of all the films made in 1930s Shanghai by 'underground' leftists, this riff on The Prisoner of Zenda is funny and engaging from first to last. The irresistible Yuan Muzhi (director of Street Angel the following year) plays both Li Tao, a revolutionary on the run, and Liu Yuanjie, an American-Chinese teacher visiting China with his fiancée. Liu is mistaken for Li and thrown into jail; Li teams up with the fiancée (Chen Bo'er, Yuan's real life wife) to get him out of prison and into the spirit of revolution. Ying Yunwei (who started out playing female roles in Chinese opera) uses chiaroscuro lighting, highly mobile camerawork and zippy pacing to give it maximum impact, but it's Yuan who really keeps you watching.
Director:
Yunwei Ying
Writer:
Hansheng Yang
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While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
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Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.