Po Tak-yan
Mok Ming moves into Po Tak-yan’s old mansion. Po's mistress, the songstress Tsi Law-heung, has died in it. Her spirit haunts the mansion as she is unburied. Mok sees her ghost and notes that she resembles his late wife Kit-ching. Mok dreams that his wife has possessed Tsi's body in return. Mok asks Uncle Tak to take him to the coffin. Tsi resurrects as Kit-ching. Mok accepts that his wife has returned from death, but he is suspicious. He brings her to a nightclub, where they chance upon Po and his mistress, Chan Mei-chu. Po is suspicious. Mok explained that his wife has returned through Tsi's body. Two reporters are there and the news is reported in the papers. To resolve his suspicions, Po goes to the old mansion. He meets Mok, his “wife,” and Uncle Tak. The wife denies that she is Tsi. Po retrieves a pistol and goes to confront the woman. Mok intervenes. In the struggle, Po falls down the railing to his death, but Tsi is shot. Now it is time for her to tell Mok of her past.
This love story spans more than a decade in the lives of an émigré engineer and a widowed primary-school teacher, a tragedy set in a small town by a lake, filmed in beautiful California locations.
This is the first 16mm Cantonese film in full colour, shot on 1940s state-of-the-art Technicolor film stock. Opera star Man-ha (Leung Bik-yuk) enjoys tremendous popularity during her performances in San Francisco, but drowns herself in the vices and temptations of the big city. Increasingly, she fails to show up for performances, almost causing the theatre to go bankrupt. When she sees her lover for the scoundrel that he is, she also sees the errors of her own ways and saves the theatre, restoring it to glory. Joseph Sunn Jue established the Grandview Film Company in Hong Kong during the 1930s and continued making films in the USA during wartime by collaborating with Chinese opera performers in exile there. Wong Hok-sing, an opera actor himself, directed, wrote and starred in this film. He staged a spectacular play-within-a-play at the end, not only to promote the art of Cantonese opera but also to boost solidarity among overseas Chinese through difficult times.
