 Welcome to St. Leveau's World Cinema. I'm your hostess, Betty St. Leveau. On this show, we talk about foreign movies and I try not to give too many statistics. I just kind of want to talk about the films. We're going to look at two today in particular. I wanted to wrap up Hong Kong filmmaking and the Nigerian film industry. I'm going to go more into the Nigerian film industry because I think this archivist that I came across, Osford, has an incredible, incredible encyclopedia that I really need to delve more deeply into in order to discuss the history of filmmaking there. At the same time, I'm going to hit on it maybe a little bit towards the end of this episode. We're going to focus on one French movie and one movie made in Hong Kong. First, we're going to start off with Jean-Win-Wong's Beautiful, The Rules of the Game. It was produced by Claude Win-Wong and Jean-Jean, made by the Gouement Film Company. It was released July 7, 1939. It runs about 110 minutes. It had a budget of five million, five to a hundred thousand, and five hundred dollars. I hope I read that right. Marcelle D'Aliot, Noah Greger, Paulette de Voste, Roland Totain, Jean-Win-Wong, Mila Parley, Gaston Maudotte, and Pierre McNair make up the cast, and you can see that the director was also in the movie. My father was the famous painter. I want to say Auguste Renoir. Hope I got that right. Now, the plot's a little convoluted. I first saw it as a teenager at Dartmouth Film Society, and I totally, totally enjoyed it. As the years go on, I see it as not as fun as I thought, but I still love this movie very much. It's a comedy of manners, but when it came out, the critics treat it like an episode of Golden Girls, unfortunately. And I'll go into that in a minute. Now, part of the plot is there's an aviator in love with a Marquis's wife. The Marquis is getting tired of his mistress, so the Marquis and another friend try to get the aviator and the mistress together. Hope that makes sense. His wife is tired of her lover, and the husband's tired of his lover. France is so not like America, okay? Especially 1930s or 40s or 50s America. Now, the mistress is a pest, and the aviator, he's a droopy drawers. Octave, Octave, played by the director, Jean-Romain, is sort of the go-between between all of them. He's actually one of the nicest characters in the whole flicker. The production was, it came together because Jean-Claire Julien Dormel, Jean Gabin, the actor who was lover of Marlena Dietrich, and Simone Simon, formed a production company like United Artists over here. Mary Pitford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks. The artists wanted to control their product, all right? But the movie, which is a lot like The Marriage of Figaro, and what's that other? The Midsummer Night's Dream didn't play well with a audience who was witnessing the partition of Austria by Germany and the evasion of Poland. And so, as Jean-Romain was trying to illustrate the cynicism of people whose lives were about to be changed forever, no one wanted to see it, no one liked it. They actually probably didn't like it because they knew things were not going to stay the same, and that the world was changing. And over in Europe in the last 50 years, before World War II, it certainly was changing quite a bit. Now in real life, Nora was the wife of Prince Ernst-Rüdiger von Stahenberg, and he was an anti-fascist. When the initials happened, they moved to France, she was Jewish, and Jean Castor in the movie ended up falling in love with her even though his love wasn't required. When the movie came out, anti-fascist groups made demonstrations, they heckled the movie, made it really hard for the movie to be seen because she was Jewish. The political situation was tense, but the set was a happy one. The director kept everyone happy. When war was declared, a bunch of men left to enlist. Many electricians and technicians left to join the French army when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia on March 16, 1939. So this hampered the production. Even though he fell in love with the actress, he ended up marrying the family nanny shortly. He commenced the relationship with her after the filming was done and she became Mrs. Benoit eventually. He wanted to screen it at the World's Fair in New York City, but it had had such a bad reception in France, he decided not to bring it over. One historian said that Nora, the lead character's performance, this lady that the director was so in love with, was haunting in the witching as looking at a plastic giraffe. That's up there with Sybil Sheppard's performance in Last Long Love, all the charisma of a dead hamster. Sometimes it's not easy on the actress, especially when the director has his heart set on you and maybe someone else should have done the part, correct? So I find that this happens frequently. Back in the day in France, Jean Cocteau would do a play or Savinsky would do some ballet. And sure enough, the movie was booed all the hell by the right wingers. There were fights. Someone tried to set the fire to the theater, but I think that even happened with Voltaire back before the French Revolution. So to me it's almost yawn, but of course they were going to try to burn the place down. Now, the post script to all of that, Italy had also annexed Albania and Franco was in Spain. Before World War II, the map was different. During the war, the map was different and after the war, the map changed, right? And so did certain ways of thinking. After World War I and after World War II in Europe and England, people wanted to be more relaxed. They didn't want to, they'd seen so much destruction and death, they wanted to be happy. And so the upswing of that was that the movie started to become accepted after a while. So when the bad press was happening, Renoir did everything to appease the critics in the public. He cut scenes. He cut scenes of himself out. He thought because he put himself in the movie, it detracted from the plot. Actually, he's a lynchpin. He's very important to the plot. The critics said it was depressing and moral morbid. It had an undesirable influence on the young. However, it's a war film that doesn't have a speck of war in it, which I also liked it too. I knew a little bit of history. Back then I understood it was a post World War II movie. So what ended up happening was that the film lab was bombed in 1942. In 1946, the 85 millimeter print was copied. In 1950, they thought about reissuing it. In 1952, it was put out in theaters again. It was declared one of the greatest films by Sight and Sound. In 1956, the excisions that Jean-Noir had did were restored. In mid-1959, when Noir saw all that was restored, except for this one little bit of him that they didn't find, he cried. He loved it. The Venice Stone Festival called it a masterpiece. I think there are three reasons why this is a great movie. Pardon me. Number one, the deep-focused photography, some critics said. Number two, Mr. Paul Mooney. People believe what they see. And as the French audience and the French critics were watching this movie, they believed what they saw. They saw the mirror image of their own society, decadent, about to be transformed, and they didn't want to see it. So they believed that that was actually the way society was. Of course, that's not the way society is, but... And then three, the critic Robin Wood said, This film operates on all levels, and it certainly does. When I was watching it, I liked it on my emotional level. I loved what I was watching it on my physical level. My brain was going off. I like all types of movies. I really loved French movies back then. I loved listening to different languages. I don't mind reading a film. So I really enjoyed it. As I get older and see it again, it's not that it's depraved or immoral. It's a little cynical, a little silly to me. These people running around trying to fix one another's lives. But one of the actresses in the movie, if I can find her name, Paulette de Beauce plays a maid, a character called Lissette. I wonder where I've heard that name before. And usually when you do see the name Lissette in novels, she's always a maid, or usually a maid. Now, there is a quote summing all this up. Each click has its own rules, and you must follow the rules of the game that the click says in order to stay within the click, which I thought was pretty interesting. I saw clicks in high school, but I don't really experience them much as an adult. I also came across a term called Objective Humanism, which kind of scares the heck out of me. Hopefully it doesn't have anything to do with those crazy existentialists that say nothing is real and everything doesn't exist. Very annoying. We all have emotions, feelings, and this chair certainly exists. So the next movie I would like to discuss, which is very, very much shared in my haul, is Wong-Kong-Wai's Chunking Express. This has Takeshi Kenshiro as He-Qual, Tony Leong-Chui as Cop 663, Takeshi Kenshiro plays Oh-Wa, Cop 223. Bridget Nguyen, looking like Red Bobble, Fei Wong plays Fei, Tom Baker, Chen Kong as Chen, Quan Li as Na, Wong Chi-Ming, Ling Song and Zhou Cheng-Sing. The film posters were designed by Sydney Wong, and Fei Wong, who plays one of the heroines in the movie, is a big pop singer. She's bigger in China than Madonna is over here. And when you watch Quentin Tarantino's edition of Chunking Express, and I think it's out of print, he does an intro and outro. And at one point behind him, you see her in some crazy outfits, and it looks great. She's a real rock star, this gal. Okay, it came out in March, in 1996, on March 8th, it had a limited run. It was under Quentin's Rolling Thunder, which is a production, it was a subsidiary of Miramax. And it also belongs to Criterion Collection. Now, both versions are out of print, I think. I happen to own a version on VHS, which makes me so happy. I haven't seen it around my library lately, but I know I've got it. Criterion has resumed the rights, and as of last month, you can catch it streaming on the Criterion channel, and please do, it's one of my favorite movies in the whole world. Okay, so Wonka Wai made this while he was editing. He made this while he was on a two-month break, making his opus Ashes in Time. The screenplay was not complete before the filming began. He wrote the second story, their two stories. The second story is my favorite. The third story he wrote became, he wrote three stories, but he left the third story out of the movie. The third story became a plot concerning a hit man in love called Fallen Angels, all right? So Wonka grew up in Toussaint Chasseau, and he wanted to film the movie where he had grown up. Now, what do you think? I wonder if we should go into the plot. We'll go into the plot first, and then we'll go into the meaning of Chunking Express. All right. Two policemen in two different stories are in love with two very different women. The stories kind of overlap. The first story concerns a young man whose lover, May, or in the month of May, has left him, and he's very sad. And he runs into this sort of spy, hit lady named, she's a gal in the blonde wig, and that's who Bridget Lynn is playing. Bridget Lynn, by the way, is, I said she's looking like Greta Gauble. She is Asia's Greta Gauble. She fantastic film career, went into retirement years ago. I think that she's so retired. The second story has to do with another policeman. That's Tony Leong. I love him. And his lady has left him also, but the girl who works in the grocery store has plans for him, all right? So both these men are dealing with a breakup, and both of them are cops and both doing their jobs, but they're both so heartbroken in so many different ways. Mr. Takeshi Kenshiro's cop, he's just kind of, he kind of young looking, and he's like sappy sad, but Tony Leong, he's like desperate sad. It's really something to watch. And something to watch Fei Wong pull her life together while she's helping him out too. You're going to love it. Now, this is shot in a place called Chun King Mansions, and basically, we don't have anything like this here. I've got the coordinates for it. 22, 17, 46, 94 North. 114, 1020, .89 East, all right? It's 3644, Nathan Road in Hong Kong. Tsim Sha Tsung Kowloon is a district, and it's a Kowloon-walled city. It has guest houses, curry restaurants, African bistros, sorry stores, foreign exchange offices. It's called the Unofficial African Quarter of Kowloon, okay? 4,000 people live there, and it was built in 1961. There are 17 stories, and there was, I think, there was ABCDE. Middle Easterners, Nigerians, Europeans, Southeast Asians, such as Sierra Lankans, Bangladeshi, Pakistanis, Nepalese, Indian, and Americans live there. Professor Gordon Matthew in 2007 said 120 nationalists passed through Chun King Mansions in one year. When I go to Hong Kong, I would love to see it. What a place. We just don't have anything like that. So he shot it there, and when you see a lot of the chase scenes, you're seeing Chun King Mansions. When you're seeing Tony Leong's apartment, that's the apartment of, I want to say, the second assistant director, or one of the screeners. It was one of the crew's apartments that they shot that story in. Love, love, love, love, love it. So I really would like you all to check that one out. And I haven't seen Ashes in Time or Fallen Angels, but I would love to. Wong Kawa is one of my favorite directors, and he's one of the fathers of Hong Kong cinema. So that will do it for that one. Beautiful, beautiful movie, and the soundtrack has a couple songs that will be familiar to you. There's Madison and Papa St. in California Dreaming, and then the Cranberry song at the end, Dream, is sung by Faye Wong and Kat Meese. So I think that that's it. Let's see. It made $7,678,549 Hong Kong. It opened on a weekend and went to gross only $600,000 to $200,000. But a little known gem, please check that out. Now, for my Nigerian segment, I would like you all, again, to read the Nigerian Filmmakers Guide to Success written by Nadia Denton, and it predicts the future of the industry and looks beyond Nollywood, okay? It's a $3.3 billion-a-year industry. Oh, this is incredible, all right? That's a lot of money. However, Pirate sees a problem, and the producers don't see their money a lot of the time, all right? They don't really see any payback from that. I think that that's it for me today. I'm your hostess, Betty St. LaVoe. You've been watching St. LaVoe's World Cinema here at WALCA. I'd like to thank the General Building for its continued support over the years, Kellogg Hubbard Library in particular, and my mother, Sharon Ardella, Paris, Warfield, Oceania, Claridge, who taught me to appreciate great movies, especially foreign ones. Until next time, baby, stay away from those bad movies. Ciao.