Word: cicada
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Sable Cicada (Hsin Hwa Motion Picture Co.). In 1938. foreign pictures, by & large, were better than Hollywood pictures. In 1939, U. S. audiences will doubtless see more foreign pictures of all sorts than ever before. Sable Cicada, released in Manhattan last fortnight, is one of the first Chinese pictures made for foreign devils as well as for domestic showings. Likely to be shown only in a few small theatres in big cities, it is nevertheless important as a symptom of an ambassadorial trend...
...Chinese companies make pictures in Cantonese (South China) dialect, two in classical Mandarin (North China) dialect. Chinese movie stars are borrowed from the Chinese stage and music halls. Average picture-production cost is about $15,000. Invasion by Japan has not interrupted Chinese cinema production. While Sable Cicada, which took two years to make, was in production at Shanghai, the studio was bombed twice. (Studio officials kept blueprints of the sets so that, in case of serious damage, they could be promptly rebuilt...
Most Chinese pictures concern contemporary domestic life, contain a derby-&-mustache stock character derived from Charlie Chaplin. Sable Cicada, however, is a $125,000 superproduction about doings of the Han dynasty in the Third Century...
...Occidental audiences, the heroine of Sable Cicada (Violet Koo) represents a combination of Pocahontas, Martha Washington, Molly Pitcher and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Foster daughter of an elderly statesman, she patriotically undertakes to relieve his political difficulties by becoming simultaneously concubine to the fat old Prime Minister and fiancee to the Prime Minister's handsome young generalissimo, thus causing internal combustion that brings in a new ministry...
Equipped with English subtitles, Sable Cicada is an ingratiating curio, remarkable for sets, costumes and genial Chinese mugging by I. E. Koo, as the lustful Prime Minister. Most censorable sequence: mischievous Cicada pretending to commit suicide and then lying to both admirers about her reasons...