The most important of all arts In 1978, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution, the Beijing Film Academy accepted new students, who in the future were to become the “Fifth Generation” and open the world to Chinese cinema. In the same year, Yuan Muzhi died in his Beijing apartment. The doctors didn't make it. Or they didn't want to make it. Even though the Mao era was over, society still lived on the realities of the Lin Biao and Confucius Criticisms and the Staff Fire. The late director spent the last fifteen years of his life in disgrace, having fallen under the pressure of one of the political campaigns. But the end of the forties and the beginning of the fifties he lived, comfortably settled in power, becoming almost the main person in the cinema of the PRC. That’s just films he did not shoot: the last time he “touched” the direction, assisting Eisenstein in the early forties.
However, at one time Yuan Muzhi became known for his acting work - both in cinema and in the theater. In Shanghai, the thirties called him the “millennial”, and he was fond of leftist ideas, dreamed of freedom, equality and peace in the world. There were a lot of them in Shanghai studios. Muzhi also loved American cinema, especially Frank Borzeigi. It was from these feelings that the film that brought him real fame – “Angel from the Streets” was born. The name he borrowed from the film Borzaigi 1928, the plot - partly from his "Seventh Heaven".
In the center of the story are two sisters who fled the war to Shanghai, where they were taken by their adoptive parents - an extremely unpleasant couple, forcing the older to work as a prostitute, and the younger - to sing in the tea room to the accompaniment of erhu. There is a company of almost impoverished but ambitious guys, the main of whom is in love with his younger sister. Alas, the adoptive parents are going to sell it to a certain fat cat, and the lovers have to flee.
True, the plot here is not even a secondary thing. The first part of the film is a real musical. The characters hardly speak, but the songs are full. Some of them were to become truly popular in China. By the middle comes the realization that the central character here is not a young couple, but an older sister. A true outcast, who has known all the dirt of the city floor, she is the complete opposite of a childishly naive sister. But Muzhi doesn't even tell the story of two deaushkas. He wants to show the city - the slums of Shanghai, the difficult lives of ordinary people, unemployment, illiteracy, poverty.
And this is the goal that almost every frame serves. The very first minutes are fashionable skyscrapers and bank buildings, and then the camera drops sharply to the narrow streets of poor neighborhoods. A couple of rags in a lawyer's office, a ruined barbershop owner, paper-painting walls. The director tries to convey the idea through comic techniques, but in the end still breaks into tragedy. “The doctor will not come. We don’t have any money, concludes a friend of the main character in the last scene. Silence, grief on faces, black screen.
Muzhi is overreacting. It is hard to argue that poverty, hunger and other charms in Shanghai in the 1930s were appalling, but the manner of presentation - jumping from a comedy musical to tragedy - at least look strange in this context. However, this can be justified. The Angel from the Street is a film from an era when cinema was still in close contact with theater. It is all that the audience of performances on the streets and in the tea houses of Shanghai are used to. Music, plot, humor, even the work of the operator are seriously influenced by this genre. In Europe, something similar was with medieval wandering artists.
But maybe that’s why “Angel from the Street” was such a big success for the Shanghai audience. Simple humor of everyday life, woven with social satire, a love story and a common tragedy for citizens. Muzhi, finding inspiration in real folk art, showed himself as a real leftist. Cinema and circus, circus and cinema.
This film was the final in the “Golden Age” of Chinese cinema. A few months later, the Japanese took over Shanghai and all the studios were closed. But Angel of the Street, its songs and characters, must have inspired someone to fight for life and freedom for the next few tough years. The fact that Yuan Muzhi stopped filming when peace, order and the most just government were established on Chinese soil is not surprising. And it's not just about censorship. Perhaps he, a child of the “time of change”, found himself in a completely alien environment, and could not understand how the world changed during the years of war. After all, it had parades, portraits of Mao, red flags and pathetic slogans. But there was no room for the old street theater with engravings from the Qin era.