Shanghai Blues

In 1937, while Shanghai is being bombed, a man and a woman take shelter under the same bridge. In the dark they cannot see each other's faces, but they promise to meet in the same place when the war ends. Ten years pass. The man now plays tuba in a marching band and is trying to write songs, and he comes back to the city to look for her. Without either knowing, the two are living in the same building, and he mistakes her new flatmate for her. Tsui Hark's film was the first production of Film Workshop, the company he set up himself. The mould is the American screwball comedy of the thirties, but the material is post-war Shanghai: crowded apartment blocks, poverty, nightclubs, people always moving. The pace is very fast and joke piles on joke. Sylvia Chang and Sally Yeh play the two women and Kenny Bee the man. A hundred and three minutes. It is among the most cited examples of the genre in Hong Kong cinema.