The Love Eterne (1963)

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The Love Eterne (1963)

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Ranked as No.1 in movieview(the No.1 movie magazine in China)’s 100 Years of Hongkong Cinema, The Love Eterne is more than a classic,it’s more like a legend in terms of its achievements and importance in Hongkong cinema history.If you’d like to see something quintessential Chinese,this one should be your first choice.

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All the dialogues in the film is sung in Huangmei tone.It originated as a form of rural folksong and dance that has been in existence for the last 200 years and possibly longer. The music is performed with a pitch that hits high and stays high for the duration of the song. It is unique in the sense that it does not sound like the typical rhythmic Chinese opera.

The Taiping rebellion occupied Hubei and brought Huangmei opera to its homeland, Guangdong.The theme of Huangmei opera began to expand with its initial introduction in Hong Kong via the 1959 film The Kingdom and the Beauty. The art form is believed to have come from the massive wave of immigrants from mainland China to Hong Kong in the 1950s. The film that peaked the music genre was this very film.

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The Love Eterne (1963)

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The Love Eterne (Liang Shan Bo and Zhu Ying Tai) is a 1963 Hong Kong musical film of the Huangmei opera genre directed by Li Han Hsiang,one of the major directors in Shaw Brothers Studio. It is based on the Chinese classic story The Butterfly Lovers, which is sometimes referred to as the Romeo and Juliet of the Far East.So even you have never heard of the story,the plot should sound familiar to you.

So what made this film a quintessential Chinese film? It broke the limitation of low budget and simple studio settings,the richness of the cinematic language including the beautiful camera movement,the magnificent production design,the perfect combination of the music and image,all those elements added up to a brand new musical genre.Especially the farewell scenes,the fantastic classic Chinese settings really showed some Chinese painting quality in them.It made the audiences believe that all classic Chinese images should like this.Ang Lee watched it when he was only nine years old,after several decades,he promoted the typical Oriental images to Western audiences by Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon.

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Speaking of the influence it made at that time,there was nothing quite like it.It was showed in 196 consecutive days in Taiwan,the final box-office reached 8 million New Taiwan Dollars,easily broke the box-office record,there were 900 thousands of tickets sold,which was three times as the entire Taiwan population.

The more legendary thing about this film is its star-making power,Ivy Ling Po,the actress who acted as a man in the film,became a huge star after it was shown.The popularity was like Greta Garbo in 1930s,there were no other news other than her everyday life in media.When it came to the award season,the Golden Horse committee had big problem of deciding if to award her with Best Actors Award or Best Actress Award.

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In a larger picture,it changed the scope of the entire Hongkong film industry.Li walked out of the competition between Shaw Brothers and Cathay ,and founded the first private film company in Taiwan called Grand Films.It brought the first real film industry to Taiwan and grounded the rise of Taiwan cinema afterwards.

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THE LOVE ETERNE (aka LIANG SHAN-PO AND CHU YING-TAI) is a 1963 Hong Kong operetta based on the oft-filmed classic story, "Liang Shan-Po And Chu Ying-Tai," aka "The Butterfly Lovers." It offers sumptuous color filming on lavish Shaw Bros. studio sets and tells its love story in a combination of dialogue and song, focusing on a pair of students at a university in Hangchow, one, Chu Ying-Tai, a female disguised as a man in order to gain entry into the school and the other an older fellow student, Liang Shan-Po.

Ying-Tai falls in love with Shan-Po and, when she has to leave school after three years, tries to drop hints in song that she's really a female as the clueless boy accompanies her part of the way on her memorable trip home. Eventually, he gets the picture but by then her family has already promised her to someone else, setting the stage for a tear-jerking finale. This is the film that Ang Lee, director of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, chose to watch with reporter Rick Lyman when he was the subject of an installment of the "Watching Movies" series in The New York Times (March 9, 2001).

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The stars of the film are Le Di (touted in the DVD cast notes as Hong Kong cinema's "one and only 'Classical Beauty'") in the role of Chu Ying-Tai and Ivy Ling Po (aka Ling Bo), one of Shaw Brothers' top female stars of the time, in the male role of Shan-Po. They're both quite captivating, whether in the straight dramatic and comic interactions of the spoken dialogue or the operetta-style singing to each other in the more intimate scenes. The camera is usually focused on the two lead performers so the success of the film depends greatly on their expertise in conveying believably the strong emotions of the intense love story, particularly in the latter stage of the film where Ying-Tai's family has effectively blocked the young pair's budding romance. Ling Po's turn as a heartbroken young man in the throes of an emotional breakdown is quite wrenching and most convincing.

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Ivy Ling Po often played young men in Chinese Opera-based Shaw Bros. films of the era, most notably THE GRAND SUBSTITUTION (1965), a tale of court politics and family loyalty in Old China. The actress can also be seen as a female swordswoman in TWIN SWORDS (1965), starring Jimmy Wang Yu. Both films are also reviewed on this site.

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The songs in LOVE ETERNE are quite pleasing and the orchestrations, making use of traditional instruments, quite evocative of Chinese Opera. The score does not use the famed "Butterfly Lovers" violin concerto, which figures prominently in a later film version of the same story, THE LOVERS (1994), directed by Tsui Hark and starring Nicky Wu (a male actor) as Liang Shan Po and Charlie Young (an actress) as Chu Ying-Tai. The characters don't sing in Hark's film, leaving the scriptwriters more time to pack the film with plot and incident and make it much more intense. They tell the same story but they're two different kinds of films, with the older one drawing more explicitly on Chinese theatrical traditions while the newer film is a little punchier and designed to spruce up the tale for modern youth appeal.

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The Taiwanese DVD available for review was made from a print with very good color values but transferred with too much cropping–on all four sides. The cropping at the bottom of the frame is designed to cover up the original burned-in Chinese subtitles and provide a space to put the new, removable subtitles. That said, it should be pointed out that much of the camera-work consists of closeups of the two leads rather than the widescreen action compositions featured in so many Shaw Bros. films that suffer from cropping when transferred to tape. Also, unlike those tape transfers, the subtitles in LOVE ETERNE are all clear and wholly visible. As a result, this DVD offers one of the better transfers of an early HK film available in the U.S., although a new subtitled widescreen transfer would be most desirable.

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ADDENDUM (April 6, 2010): Since doing this review, the film has come out, under the title LOVE ETERNE, in a restored, remastered Region 3 DVD from Celestial Pictures as part of its massive Shaw Bros. restoration campaign. Watching the new DVD was like seeing it for the first time. It's a beautiful film and Ivy Ling Po's performance is breathtaking. Also since the original review, a Taiwanese animated version of the tale has come out on DVD, under the title THE BUTTERFLY LOVERS (2003). It has its good points, but is too Disney-influenced and kiddie-oriented to satisfy me.

IMDB Reviewer

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Special Features:
Disc One:
- Song Selection
- Trailer

Disc Two (with Chinese and English subs):
- Shaw Showcase: The Love Eterne (18:53)
- Ivy Ling Po Music Video (06:40)
- The Savant - Li Han-hsiang (15:33)
- The Huangmeixi Romances: scroll one ~ History (16:49)
- Movie Stills, Original Poster, Production Notes, Biography and Selected Filmography