Chinese night

The sailors Tetsuo Nagaya and Senkichi Yamashita on one of Shanghai's streets rescue a young Chinese woman Keiran from a bully Japanese. Keiran - the daughter of a Shanghai entrepreneur, during the Japanese invasion, she lost her parents and home, after which she began to wander around the streets. Keiran is anti-Japanese, and she really does not like the fact that the invaders became her benefactors. She says that she will work out and pay her debt for salvation, and comes to the house (a specialized hotel for the Japanese), in which Nagaya and Yamashita live. When Keiran washes away the dirt, Nagaya marvels at her beauty and decides to dispel her misconceptions about the Japanese. After the girl fell ill with a high fever, the Japanese who lived in the hotel, including Toshiko, the secret admirer of Nagai, surrounded Keiran with care and attention. However, after recovering, Keiran first returns to the ashes of his native home and indulges in memories of a happy life with his parents, the end of which was put by the Japanese invaders. She returns to the Japanese and pours out her rage on them. An angry Nagaya in a fit of anger gives the girl a slap in the face, after which Keiran suddenly realizes her mistake: she falls to her knees in front of her savior, asks for forgiveness and gently fawns.

One night, Keiran is abducted by members of the anti-Japanese resistance organization to which she once belonged. Their goal is to find out from Nagai plans for the transportation of military goods. However, the summoned Nagaya resolutely refused to cooperate. They want to deal with him, but thanks to Keiran’s ingenuity, the situation is changing, and the police officer who comes in time helps Nagai. These events deepen the relationship between Nagai and Keiran, and they decide to get married. On the evening of the wedding day, Nagaya receives an order to take command of the transportation of military goods and leaves, leaving his young wife. The transport ship is attacked by anti-Japanese resistance fighters. Keiran, awaiting the return of her husband, receives news that Nagaya has been killed. She travels to Suzhou , where they both spent happy hours, and sobbing on the hill, calls Nagaya. Approaching the canal, she decides to drown herself. But then Nagaya appears on the horizon, who actually managed to escape. In the final shots, lovers hug each other on a stone bridge thrown across the canal.

After the establishment of an occupation regime over the northern regions of China, Japanese aggressors actively began to impose the national ideology of "Asia for Asians", which implied " mutual prosperity " under the rule of the Japanese nation. To propagate the notions of the noble occupiers who bring peace and prosperity to the captured peoples, all means of propaganda were used, including cinema. The main cradle of Japanese propaganda cinema in China was the film company Manchuria , in which Chinese collaborators also collaborated with the Japanese. Despite the low artistic quality of the paintings produced by the company, it was its products that were launched for rent in the occupied territories, while the production of Shanghai and other film studios not controlled by the Japanese was banned. In 1939, "Manchuria" began to actively engage the young actress and singer Li Xianglan, who in her first paintings ("富貴 春夢" and "冤魂 復仇") embodied the image of an innocent, upright Chinese woman. However, already in the same year «東遊記, Li Xianglan appeared in front of the audience in a new guise: in the picture, which tells about two Chinese simpletons who went in search of their fellow countryman in Tokyo, Li played a Chinese woman who lives and works in Tokyo, He speaks fluent Japanese and introduces the Chinese to life in Japan. The painting was produced jointly by Manchuria and the Japanese company of Togo. Togo will continue to release propaganda films with Li Xianglan next year, however, in collaboration with the Shanghai film company.

In addition to Li Xianglan, the actor Kazuo Hasegawa was invited to the shooting of the movie "Chinese Night". The shooting took place in Shanghai, at the Studios .

As the actress herself recalled, the scene with a slap in the face in which Nagaya, to calm down the angry Keiran, releases the girl with a slap in the face, the most memorable for her. “I almost got hurt from this slap in the face,” the actress recalled. - Stars flew out of my eyes, and my ear caught fire so much that I stopped hearing at all. But the camera continued to move, which meant that it was necessary to continue playing. Those words that I forgot had to be replaced on the go. After the shooting was completed, Kazuo Hasegawa came up to me and asked for forgiveness: “I really cracked you, sorry.”

The final scenes, where the heartbroken Keiran is preparing to drown in the river, were shot not in China, but in the area near Tokyo. To shoot the scene, it was necessary to find a river with low banks, so that the actress could come close in the water. Li Xianglan recalled that the banks of the river were so clayey that her heels simply got stuck, preventing her from moving: “Therefore, my tortured expression on my face, which should have meant complete confusion and desire to commit suicide, turned out to be so realistic precisely because of this locality, for which I am grateful to her. "

According to the magazine 新 映 画, "Chinese Night" became "the highest grossing Japanese film of 1940." ^[1] However, the main success came to the picture not in China (where even the cinemas that were focused exclusively on Japanese films refused to show it), but abroad: from 1940 until the end of the war, the film was shown abroad in Taiwan ^[2] , in Korea ^[3] , USA ^[4] , Vietnam ^[5] , Thailand ^[6] , Hong Kong ^[7] , Philippines ^[8] , Burma ^[9] , Indonesia ^[10] .

The title song "Sina no yoru" gained immense popularity, making Li Xianlan one of the brightest stars of the time ^[11] .

For the Chinese themselves, the picture did not cause anything but disgust. The picture was criticized for the fact that the main character was “sold” to the Japanese ^[12] , posing as a Chinese woman eager to become Japanese ^[13] . The scene with a slap in the face and a humiliating creep in front of the Japanese was considered propaganda, and Li Xianglan herself was largely due to this scene and this film was branded as a “traitor to the Chinese people” and “spy”.

However, the film did not seem propaganda to the Japanese, and even vice versa - it received a portion of criticism for its strong melodramatic bias, to the detriment of a demonstration of state ideology. That is why both the military ^[14] , and film critics ^[15] , and censors ^[16] , and columnists ^[17] criticized the film as “contrary to national politics” ( Jap. 国策 に 逆行 す る 映 画 ) . And although at first glance the plot of the film looked propaganda to avoid censorship ^[18] , the melodramatic scene at the scene of the battle in Shanghai enraged the censors, and the scene where the main characters hugged was considered by them too weak ^[19] .

In post-war Japan, episodes with a total duration of about 30 minutes were cut from the original film, and the picture was re-released under the name Suzhou Serenade. It was this version in 2003 that was released on video by Kinema Gugakubu ( キ ネ マ 倶 楽 部 ), and in February 2009 and August 2010 it was shown on the CS-terabi TV channel.

The original version of the film is occasionally shown at the cinema center of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo .

After the end of World War II, Li Xianglan herself was captured by the Chinese authorities and came under investigation as a collaborator and traitor. Only thanks to the efforts of her childhood friend, she was able to prove that she is an ethnic Japanese, and her real name is Yamaguchi Yoshiko. In an interview given to a Chinese journalist many years later, Yamaguchi admits that he is ashamed of his decision to star in this and many other propaganda films, a decision that no Chinese actress would accept.

• Tetsuo Nagaya - Kazuo Hasegawa;
• Keiran - Li Xianlan ;
• Senkichi Yamashita - Katamari Fujiwara;
• Toshiko Miura - Tomiko Hattori;
• Zhang Zixian - Yo Siomi;
• Fuminosuke Yamazaki - Koh Mihashi;
• sailor Yamada - Zempei Saga;
• Arata - Kinji Fuji;
• Fuminaga - Zeiichiro Quito;
• Iwai - Nagashima Takeo;
• Masao Arata - Takashi Odaka;
• Natsu Yamazaki - Tamae Kiyogawa;
• Aunt Arata - Rikie Sanjo;
• Li Guilan's mother is Fusako Fujima;
• grandmother Li Guilan - Chiyoko Komine;
• Bully - Heikuro Imanari.