Famous Chinese ballad singer Han Chi-hsiang

CURRENT FILMS

Rotating backside essence
of U.S. ‘Monroe Doctrine’

One of the many Hollywood
answers to TV is the Monroe Doc-
trine. It is given the full Techni-
color treatment in Niagara, the
most uninhibitedly bad film for
a long time.

What is the Monroe Doctrine?
It is the theory that you don’t
have to be able to act if you have
a thrustful bust and can wiggle
your hips as your walk.

It is personified by Marilyn
Monroe, a young woman with an
unvarying air of prim vacancy,
who has achieved stardom mainly
by walking into rooms with an
emphasized bosom and walking
out of them with a rotating back-
side.
Now she has been set in front
of Niagara Falls and given some
acting to do, with ludicrous re-
sults.

Lying in bed looking sultry,
singing in her shower or loafing
around a dance floor in split skirt
and revealing blouse, she is sup-

posed to be the last word in

_snaky, thrilling sex.

Instead, when she is, not
downright ridiculous, she is a
tiresome bore. As a caricature
of a sexy blonde secretary in an
earlier film she was acceptably
amusing. But now we are expect-
ed to take the caricatures serious-

ly.
In fairness it must be admitted
that better actors than she are
defeated by the story, in which
she is the faithless wife of a
battle-shocked, neurotic Joseph
Cotten.
_ Much seems to turn on a total-
ly unmemorable and tuneles§ song
ealled “Kiss.” Marilyn insists on
her fellow holiday campers at
Niagara Falls playing it’ while
they dance (“There is no other

song,” she says, moodily).

. Her husband rushes out in a
mad rage and smashes the re-
cord (“I guess your husband
_ doesn’t like music,” sagely ob-
serves another character). .
And wife and lover communi-
cate with each other by having
the city authorities play it on a

Mr. Cotten, moody enough to
start with, loses patience when
his wife’s lover tries to push him
over a cliff. He strangles Miss
Monroe in the carillon tower,
chases Jean Peters, a chance ac-
quaintance, in front of some
Niagara Falls scenery and tries to
make a getaway in a motorboat.

Miss Peters is rescued by heli-
copter and the boat carries the
unlucky Mr. Cotten (as we knew
it must) over the falls.

Practically the whole film is
played against the background of
the falls, the simple impressive-
ness of which serves to empha-
size the elaborate futility of the
‘antics in front of them.

Keeping her head admirably,
Jean Peters manages to inject
some slight hint of character and
credibility into the part of the

sensible American honeymooner™

who becomes involved in this
hotchpotch of heavy passion.

But it is heavy going and she
gets little help from the others.

* > *

House of Wax is embellished
with Natural Vision (the stereo-
scope process), Warnercolor (a
slightly murky color process
used by Warner Brothers) and
Warnerphonic sound, which
seems to mean that all the more
violent crash noises and _ high-
pitched screams come from be-
hind you instead of from the
screen. a

All this to give us a story, of
a kind popular before the first
world war, about a mad wax-
works proprietor who makes his
models by strangling likely look-
ing girls and dunking them in
boiling wax,

Among the effects presented in
three dimensions to get a well-
earned “X” certificate are the
burning down of a waxworks with
close-ups of the melting faces,
sundry hangings and stranglings
and a jolly little scene of the
stealing of a corpse from a
morgue.

CHINA’S MOST POPULAR BALLADEER

Blind artist who plays, sings
for people now Chinese hero

HAN CHI-HSIANG, blind bal-
lad singer and player on the san
hsien, a three-stringed instrument
has long been known throughout
all North Shensi Province in
China. He is 39 and strongly
built. He has a shy smile but he
is confident in his art. This year
he became nationally famous at

the first All China Folk Music and .

Dance Festival at Peking. To an
audience of thousands in China’s
capital he sang his ballad of the
liberation of the village people.
It was a story based on his own
experience.

Thirty-nine years ago, Han Chi-
hsiang was born in Shensi, in rug-
ged Northwest China. His family
was landless. They barely existed
on the few coppers his mother
earned selling bean curd milk.
When even this peddlar’s busi-
ness failed to provide food and
they ‘were all faced with starva-
tion, his older brother was sent
to a monastery to become a monk
and his sister was sold to be a
slave girl. Six-year-old Han Chi-
hsiang himself, who had become
blind after an attack of small-
pox, ground grain for a landlord.
He got a single bowl of rice and
slops for a hard day’s work.

When he was 13 his mother
gave the last coppers of her sav-
ings to apprentice him to a blind
musician. He avidly learned the
traditional stories, legends and
folk songs, and mastered the lute.
In four month he has memorized
what it ordinarily takes three
years to learn. Then he took to
the road, tramping from village
to village. Han Chi-hsiang won
immediate popularity among the
people. His technique of imper-
sonating each character—young

or old, man or woman—was near

perfection. He continually en-
riched the melodies of his bal-
lads with folk songs.

The peasants loved his singing
but they were so poor themselves
that they could afford to give
him barely enough to keep body
and soul together. Once during
the famine, he was just about to
hang himself in despair when a
neighbor came with half a bowl
of food and argued him into liv-
ing on.

In 1934, part of Shensi Prov-
ince was liberated and under the
control of the people’s forces and
part was still under the Kuomin-
tang dictatorship. Han’s home
was in the White area. One day
however he wandered by acci-
dent into the Border Region —
liberated area. Here for the first
time in his life he was treated
with kindness and respect.

* * *

IN MAY 1942, Chairman Mao
Tse-tung had his famous Round
Table talks with the writers of
the liberated areas, and a new
cultural movement was launched
to popularize the folk arts, to
adapt them to serve the people.
Han Chi-hsiang was drawn into
the movement. Only then did he
realize that although he was one
of the folk artists, his stories
were either about high officials
and generals or talented young
nfen and beautiful ladies. They
were seldom about people like
honest peasants.

Working with the poetry. and
ballad section of the Federation
of Writers of the liberated areas
he began to think along neW lines.
He wanted to sing something out
of the real life of the people
with whom he was so familiar—

GUIDE TO GOOD READING

their joys and sorrows,
strengths and weaknesses, :
hopes for a better life. He 1
modelled many of his old balla

and. composéd an entirely new

tale, Four Mistakes in a Messag®

to help the mass education move :

ment that was then being carrie
on in the region. It is a ©0
ballad relating how a father aM

son, owing to mistakes in their

writing, got their affairs thorough

ly mixed up. The peasants 4
ed immensely. It was SO :
to life they got its lesson imme
diately. It was a great help to
literary campaign. All Han’s neW
work has this down-to-earth its
mediacy of impact. ie

His ballad of the Reunion of
Liu Chiao is based on a true stoly
of a peasant girl who subbo
resisted the marriage her ol
ents had arranged for her re
finally married the man of he
choice. Han enriched this f
with sharp characterizations “i
village characters, and after ©
tening carefully to the com
of the peasants, revised it fe
times. It became the most POP!
lar of the new ballads of Shens»_
and later, of the country. ©

So Han Chi-hsiang became
folk artist of a new type, ab ina
singer of the new people of ch ; 3
a brilliant performer as well sy
participant in all of the great MY
tional movements whether
the health wanipaide or the
nation-wide elections.
composed 110 new ballads.
also active in the cause
blind, At the active t&
classes he heads in Shensi '
170 blind men and women
learning all he has to teac™
art and in life—YANG YU:

Eugene Sue, forgotten author, -

outsold Hugo,

FOR MOST people who read
Eugene Sue is a forgotten name.
Yet in his day he figured as the
high-water mark of romantic sen-
sational Parisian journalism —
with a strong flavor of Red Re-
publicanism and Communism.

For us he is chiefly important
as giving vividly — albeit uncon-

sciously — a picture of the cultu- ©

ral situation from which Marx
emerged and against which as a
background he made his distinc-
tive point of departure.

Sue’s chief output was fiction,
published serially in Parisian
journals.. As was the case with

Rousseau’s “Julie,” the printing

presses could not keep pace with
the demand, Newsagents loaned
the journal containing Sue’s latest
instalment at so much per half-
hour. é

* * *

Born in 1804, the son of an
Army and Navy surgeon high in
favor with the Emperor Napo-
leon, Mary-Joseph-Eugene Sue had
the Empress Josephine as one of
his god-parents. \

Succeeding to a considerable
fortune on the death of his father
he turned to literature and
achieved a quick success by the
use of the methods. of Byron in
the field of prose-fiction.

Stern critics found him fantas-
tically absurd. But the general
readers in France, and particu-

ont i P27 — ¥ i
larly in Paris, found AIT exactly
to their liking.

For a time he out-sold and out-
classed both Alexandre Dumas
and Victor Hugo—with Balzac an

“also ran” and Stendhal a virtual
non-starter.

When his Mysteries of Paris re-
vealed that he had gone over
wholly to the sentimental Social-
ism of the time, Sue’s popularity
transcended description.

* a *

The book—which ran to eight
volumes—was soon translated in-
to English, and soon after imitat-
ed by G, W. M. Reynolds (the
founder of Reynold’s News) in the
Mysteries of London.

Even this phenomenal repute
was surpassed by his next work,
The Wandering Jew, which ran
to 11 volumes, and in dramatic
versiéns and translations is still
doing duty.

His great moment came when,
hot on the heels of the Revolu-
tion of February, 1848, he began
to issue his masterpiece, the
Mysteries of the People — sub
titled The Histories of a Proletar-
ian Family Through the Ages.

Dumas, Balzac —

ae
In this work—which ra t¢ and

Republicanism, and

“sympathy with the

munism of Baboeuf,
Blanqui.

It had the effect of P

an exit

-ing a special press law, publish

tax upon all newspaPpe
ing serials.

ex’
It was this—aimed aS wes Dh
plicitly at Sue’s work, ¥
actionaries found both —
and “‘seditious”—whi
retort of the ‘Aes
who took the oP! ‘
bye-election to send He 1
Assembly as a ‘socia)
can’,”

He took his place °
treme Left. But his
serial had been barely

n th

‘when his parliamentary su
brought to an end by thee wis

. of peo

sion of the assemb '
Napoleon’s coup d’et@
soustt

ber 1851. ott
Sue, like Vietor Hush, pst

to rouse the Parisians on

cade battle ‘Of Pe,

d’etat.

letarian militancy had

en in the bloody

1848.
—7T. A. J

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — AUGUST 28, 1953 -

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