Archival Gems – Time After Time III
Finding Precious Pearl

In the mid- to late 1960s, a refreshing breath of youthful air breezed through Cantonese cinema, as teen films saturated with trendy youth culture became increasingly popular. An iconic figure of that phenomenon is Connie Chan Po-chu, perhaps the biggest star of the period. Chan actually first made her presence known with period costume films, a presence that grew exponentially as the song-and-dance musicals featuring her and fellow swinging youngsters started to capture the fancy of Hong Kong’s baby-boom generation. Her films represent an effort to find a balance between the traditional and the modern during the 1960s, celebrating an increasingly western way of life without seriously challenging established Chinese values. Chan quickly earned the nickname ‘Princess of Movie Fans’ as the number of devoted and sometimes feverishly-passionate fans grew. With silky long hair, expressive round eyes and always draped in trendy fashion, her youthful image was infectiously appealing to young men and especially women who came of age at the advent of Hong Kong’s economic miracle. But looking back on her filmography, among the 240 movies in which she had acted, her stellar career also included martial arts movies and Cantonese opera films. Many of her appearances were in male roles, a testimony to the versatility of her acting chops.

In 2019, the Hong Kong Film Archive set in motion a five-year digitisation project, giving new life to 150 original celluloid films either sole existing copies or prints in unsatisfactory conditions. The ongoing programme ‘Archival Gems – Time After Time’ is presented to introduce some of the digitised films to the audience. ‘Finding Precious Pearl’, the third instalment of the programme, features four films starring Connie Chan, whose Chinese name ‘Po-chu’ translates as ‘Precious Pearl’, capturing the luminous youth idol in different phases of her glorious career.

1966 can be considered the watershed year in Chan’s career, the film You Do Me Wrong (1966) marking her transition into youth films made in contemporary settings. She began acting in 1958 and had 141 films to her credit by 1966. Among them, 127 are costumed period films and she plays male roles in more than 85 of them (roughly two-thirds of the total), including three of the titles screened in this programme. They are A Sword and Nine Rings, Part Two (1961), The Devil and Her Magic Needles, Part Two (1964) and The Bloody Devil, Concluding Episode (1965), Chan’s early films made before her turn as modern-day teen idol. These titles are records of her professional growth, first playing minor but eye-catching roles, then as second-lead hero with a romantic subplot, graduating to male lead as chivalrous martial artist.

Starting in 1966, riding on the changing waves of youth culture, Chan was transformed from fresh-faced male lead to beautiful, exuberant teenage girl, becoming a superstar. Of the over one hundred films she made from 1966 until her 1972 retirement, 64 are in contemporary costume. The Magic Cat (1969), made in the later part of her career, is a spirited musical featuring a fascinating and unique romance between a man and a cat, co-starring the screen idol Lui Kay.

The Devil and Her Magic Needles, Part Two and The Bloody Devil, Concluding Episode are sequels to earlier works that are not included in the digitisation project. To facilitate better understanding of stories, The Devil and Her Magic Needles, Part One (1964) and The Bloody Devil, Part One (1965), the beginning chapters of the respective series, will also be screened as reference films.