Art house: The Lotus Lamp's box office success mostly due to the death of star Lin Dai
A ferocious competitor and the death of a stellar headliner helped turn The Lotus Lamp (1965) into one of its decade's most resilient blockbusters. Ironically, the potentially crippling challenges that enhanced the lavish epic by endowing it with a special dimension continue to weave a fascinating spell.
The huangmei ("yellow plum") genre, a semi-operatic Putonghua-dialect costume saga, was at its peak when the Shaw Brothers announced a project that seemed certain to guarantee success.
The material, based on a legend concerning the love between a goddess and a human, had been sufficiently popular with Cantonese movie-goers to be filmed as an operatic trilogy, The Precious Lotus Lamp (1956-1958). A traditional mainland-produced feature, Magic Lotus Lantern, was also well received when it was released in Hong Kong in 1960.
Perhaps it was too popular, in fact, because rival film company MP & GI immediately rushed into production, utilising five directors and a two-week shooting schedule to churn out its own black-and-white Putonghua adaptation, The Magic Lamp. Shaw was undaunted, budgeting its version for colour and widescreen "Shawscope", and handing stewardship to Griffin Yueh Feng, one of the most accomplished Shanghai writer-directors to relocate here after the second world war.
The production's biggest name, however, belonged to Linda Lin Dai, assigned the role of the Holy Goddess banished to exile beneath the base of Mount Hua after giving birth to a boy sired by a mortal scholar. Fourteen years later, the adolescent Chen Hsiang (played by cross-dressing actress Cheng Pei-pei) makes use of the titular lantern and a mystical sword to rescue his sainted parent.
Lin's participation proved a double-edged sword, with her celebrity power leading to Shaw's newest sensation, Ivy Ling Po, being axed from the role of Chen Hsiang (although Ling's singing voice remains). Lin went on to impersonate both mother and son, with the 29-year-old actress hardly convincing as the latter. Also miscast was Cheng, in her first important role at the age of 17.