Street Angel (Malu tianshi) dir. / sc. Yuan Muzhi With Zhao Dan, Zhou Xuan, Wei Heling, Zhao Huishen Shanghai: Mingxing Film, 1937.

Street Angel dramatizes good-hearted urban youths struggle to escape from their corrupt environment in the poorest district of Shanghai. The film opens with a comic marriage procession in which Chen Xiaoping plays trumpet for the band. Chen is in love with his neighbor, Hong, who fled from Manchuria with her sister, Yun, after the Japanese occupation. While Yun has been forced into prostitution, Hong travels around with her tutor singing songs. One day the tutor decides to sell Hong to a small-time gangster. Chen and his friends want to free her and decide to consult the lawyer Zhang. However, they soon discover that without money the law will not help the poor. Running away provides the only solution, and Hong does this with the help of Chen. They live together in another district of the city. Yun comes for a visit and dreams of starting a new life with Chen's friend, Wang, but the evil tutor asks a gangster to track them down. Although Hong manages to escape Yun is stabbed by the two men. Friends gathered around Yun9s bedside can do nothing but watch her die. This story of solidarity, friendship, and love amongst the dregs of urban society has been interpreted in different ways. It is certainly a critique of Shanghai9s semi-colonialist society; it might have been inspired by Frank Borzage9s Street Angel (1928); it has even been described as a Chinese forerunner of Italian neorealism. A canonized leftist film, it combines Hollywood and Soviet film techniques with traditional Chinese narrative arts.

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