Women Side by Side | |
---|---|
Traditional | 麗人行 |
Simplified | 丽人行 |
Mandarin | Lìrén Xing |
Directed by | Chen Liting |
Produced by | Ren Zongde |
Written by |
Tian Han Chen Liting |
Starring |
Shangguan Yunzhu Huang Zongying Sha Li Zhao Dan Lan Ma |
Cinematography | Han Zhongliang Wu Weiyun |
Production
company |
|
Release date
|
January 1949 |
Running time
|
102 minutes |
Country | China |
Language | Mandarin |
Women Side by Side (simplified Chinese: 丽人行; traditional Chinese: 麗人行; pinyin: Lìrén Xíng), also translated as Three Women and Female Fighters, is a 1949 Chinese film directed by Chen Liting made near the end of the Republic of China era. It is Chen's most famous directorial work. Denounced as a "poisonous weed" during the Cultural Revolution, the film is now considered a Chinese classic.
The film is adapted from a play of the same title written by the noted leftist playwright Tian Han, who also wrote the 1932 film Three Modern Women. Tian Han and Chen Liting co-wrote the screenplay. The film tells the story of three women in wartime Shanghai under Japanese occupation: an uneducated factory worker, an intellectual resistance activist, and a bourgeois new woman. In many ways it can be seen as a sequel to Cai Chusheng's 1935 film New Women. Produced by the left-wing Kunlun Film Company, the film has a strong anti-Kuomintang government undertone.
The film is set in the Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1944. Jinmei (Shangguan Yunzhu), a textile worker, is raped by two drunken Japanese soldiers on her way home from work. Xinqun (Huang Zongying) and her boyfriend Mengnan (Zhou Feng), who are members of underground resistance, come to her aid and bring her to the home of their friend Ruoying (Sha Li). Ruoying's husband Yuliang (Zhao Dan) had left Shanghai when war broke out in 1937 to join the anti-Japanese resistance, leaving behind his wife and baby daughter Beibei. After years passed without hearing from her husband, Ruoying has married the prosperous banker Zhongyuan (Lan Ma), assuming Yuliang has died. Zhongyuan claims to be politically "unaffiliated". He works with the Japanese but does not inform on his wife's activist friends.