A period romantic epic set on the Chinese mainland, The Blue and the Black – Part 1 was one of the main posthumous releases following the death of its star, Hong Kong screen siren Linda Lin Dai, during shooting in 1964. Lin Dai had her scenes in Part 2, also released in 1966 and screening alongside Part 1 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s Linda Lin Dai season, completed by another actress, Elsie Tu, but her only noticeable absence in the first installment comes at the very end, when her character is only seen from behind during what should have a emotional parting that normally would have bathed in her impassioned close-up.
Denying the audience that shot is, in a roundabout way, in the film’s spirit, because The Blue and the Black – Part 1 is concerned with deprivation, both on a personal and public level. Set in occupied Tianjin during the 1930s, when much of China had been occupied by the brutal Japanese army, the story initially lets the political situation hover in the background. The wealthy households that provide the protagonists have made their accommodations with, or at least looked away from, the foreign rulers, and life goes on – army trucks may roll through the streets, but the university students watching them are still able to go ice-skating together afterwards.
Beginning with a formal birthday celebration for a family matriarch that is defined by custom and deferment towards traditional authority, the movie places numerous restraints upon Tang Qi (Lin Dai) and Zhang Ji (Shan Kwan). Both are without their parents, and live with extended families that the former chafes against and the latter forlornly obeys. 'She’s very naughty, but very pretty," observes one of Tang’s relations, but her extended family worry about unfounded gossip. Even as she’s falling in love with Zhang, they’re planning to arrange her marriage, and her simple defiance of wanting to choose her own husband earns her more than scorn. 'I would have killed myself long ago," declares the matriarch, sparing nothing to make her anger clear.
Zhang wants to join his older brother in traveling south to fight for the Chinese nationalist army, but he won’t struggle to win Tang. When his family orders him not to see her he accepts with scenes of melodramatic excess (it’s not helped by both Lin Dai and Kwan being a touch too old for the younger versions of their characters). When he won’t risk everything to be with her she turns her back on him, and when he asks her to join the armed struggle with him she doesn’t go because his brother begs her not to be a distraction that could cost Zhang his life. Part 1 takes its time in establishing their love, but it allows for them to be suitably divided, setting the scene for their struggle to reunite in Part 2 as he fights and she sings in a nightclub.
The film is also notable for the mature technique of director Ching Doe, a regular Lin Dai collaborator. For one shot, where the two leads walk home together after an early assignation, the camera follows them from above, through the extended studio set, so that you sense them as figures in a wider, confused, landscape, while the interiors take a calm measure of the polite, repressive figures that accumulate in each room to deny the characters their freedom. You have to wonder what he and Lin Dai would have managed together if their working relationship hadn’t ended so suddenly when she was still only 29-years-old.
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