万紫千红影评：张爱玲影评(双语)：万紫千红 / On With the Show 和 燕迎春 / The Call of Spring
一九四三年十月，张爱玲在英文月刊《二十世纪 / XXth Century》第五卷第四期的影评专栏“On the Screen”中，发表了两部电影“万紫千红 / On With the Show”和“燕迎春 / The Call of Spring”的英文影评。影评全文扫描请见美国夏威夷大学马诺阿分校哈密尔顿图书馆中的电子版馆藏（可直接下载PDF）：
http://evols.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10524/32591
On With the Show[万紫千红]. In the leading parts: Li Li-hwa[李丽华], Yen Djuen[严俊], and Wang Tan-feng[王丹凤].
The Call of Spring[回春曲]. In the leading parts: Liu Chuen[刘琼] and Hu Foong[胡枫].
Much of the box-office appeal of On With the Show depends on its promises of sophisticated sensuality; yet the film is curiously naïve. Li Li-hwa (her photograph appeared in Vol. IV p.141 of this magazine) takes the part of a beautiful and oratorical waitress in a restaurant picturesquely old-fashioned in the European style. Making her first appearance on a cart loaded with hay and farm produce, Li Li-hwa sings and recklessly throws apples to street children. With her songs, her charms, and the aid of the Takarazuka dancers(注：日本宝冢歌剧团), she finally raises enough funds to found an orphanage.
Justifying the entertainment by the worthy cause of charity is one of those usual attempts to assuage the demand for an immediate purpose in art. However, On With the Show fails to please everybody all round. Mosquito papers, by far the most favored reading matter among certain urban sets, have contributors who suspect that they do not like On With the Show because of its moralizing. The cannot help complaining that Li Li-hwa shows her famous legs only once, and then half buried in furs.
In Chinese eyes, the Takarazuka dance are expressive only of the splendor of youth, health and intelligent discipline. To the average Chinese, the fascination of ballet lies chiefly in its difficulty. They also find the traditional Japanese dances hard to understand on the screen without the help of the symphonic colors of costumes and background. But on the other hand the audience laughs heartily at the practical jokes the hero and heroine play upon each other—Li Li-hwa fries some bad eggs for her admirer and he sends her an empty cup of ice cream. Also well received are the Chinese Laurel and Hardy who mess about in the restaurant kitchen. On With the Show is a success with the public in spite of its banal situations, its structural weakness, and its apparent clashing of adult and infantile interests. The last-mentioned shortcoming may be disregarded, because modern Chinese of all ages are like children in their fondness for birthday cakes, with or without dancers swirling around one as in the charity performance in On With the Show. The whole picture is modelled on the Hollywood series of Gold Diggers and The Big Broadcast and is meant to "feed the eyes with ice cream and seat the heart in a sofa"—to quote the phrase a Chinese critic once applied to these American extravaganzas.
The Call of Spring presents a far more serious problem. With the modern, Westernized stage as its background, it is written, directed and enacted by Liu Chuen (also portrayed in Vol. IV, p.145 of this magazine), the idol of girl students. The Call of Spring finds an enormous following among the young intelligentsia and is formidably advertised as "recommended by the critical public." In the role of an actor, Liu has the opportunity to do bits as Romeo and as Armand of La Dame aux Camélias. In another "play within the play," Liu makes a convincing old man, but an Occidental one who digs his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets à la Lionel Barrymore. The hero of the picture writes plays with the help of coffee, and the camera dwells with genuine delight on the glittering coffee-pot. When in distress, he gets drunk in a bar. When he falls into poverty, he works as a coolie in a park, his overcoat shabby but shapely like that of a smart foreign tramp; his life in the park seems a perpetual picnic with lots of time for brooding by the campfire.
It is appalling to reflect that, in the imagination of young Chinese intellectuals nurtured on a quarter of a century of foreign films and fiction, there is so little room for anything really Chinese. The transformation has clearly gone past the stage of "fundamentally Chinese, functionally Western, (注：中学为体，西学为用)" the slogan invented at the beginning of this process of Westernization.
The unanalytical acceptance of foreign romances— reality twice removed— results in much posturizing. In modern Chinese art as well as life, the expre$sion is often affected when the emotion is genuine. Liu Chuen is doubtlessly sincere in The Call of Spring, especially in his passionate exposure of greedy theatrical managers. The hero acts always in accordance with the new sense of propriety. Accidentally crippled, he feels he stands in the way of his wife's happiness. He leaves the scene. In a tragic little note he gives her his blessing and asks her not to look for him, as it would be futile. A glance at the personal column in Chinese newspapers ("Since you disappeared, mother refuses to eat or leave her bed. Grandmother had her heart attacks. Whole family daily washes face with tears. Return at once") shows us that Chinese under thirty are prone to walk out of their homes because of abstract principles, domestic disputes, failure to pass examinations, the incompatibility of cultural atmosphere, etc. Perhaps no other work has influenced the average educated Chinese of this century so much as Ibsen's A Doll's House, and in this, as in everything else learned from the West, the Chinese are more impressed by the bleak beauty of Nora's gesture than by the underlying thought. — Eileen Chang[张爱玲]
在中国人眼中，宝冢的歌舞只表现青春的美好、健康，和合理的规律。对普通的中国人来说，芭蕾舞的吸引力是在它的困难程度上。他们也觉得日本歌舞在银幕上如果没有服装和背景的缤纷彩色，便很难明白。另一方面，观众对男女主角互相捉弄感到开心——李丽华给她的追求者煎了些臭蛋，而他又送给她空的冰淇淋杯子。还有那对把厨房弄得一团糟的中国莱路、哈地，也被观众所接受。虽然“万”片有着平平无奇的场景、软弱的结构，和成人与儿童口味的冲突，它对一般观众来说仍是成功的。至于上面所说的第三个缺点，我们可以不理，因为中国现在的成年人也和小孩一样喜欢生日饼，不管它是否像在《万》片的慈善表演中一样有舞女在旁边团团转。全片仿照好莱坞的Gold Diggers(注：华纳兄弟1929年至1938年间发行的系列歌舞片，共五部)和它的续集The Big Broadcast(注：派拉蒙1932年至1938年间发行的系列歌舞片，共四部)，目的是要使观众做到对这两部美国歌舞片的评语所说的“眼睛吃冰淇淋，灵魂坐沙发椅”。
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