Genü hongmudan Review: Clunky, crackly, but historically cool

If you somehow get the chance to watch Genü hongmudan, do it only if you actually care about how movies learned to talk. Casual viewers will probably turn it off after five minutes because the audio is insanely rough 📻.

But for history nerds? This is basically the holy grail of early Chinese cinema.

The story is a classic melodrama about Hong Peony, a famous singer who marries a complete garbage fire of a man named Faxiang Chen. He spends the entire movie gambling away her hard-earned money and ruining her career.

Honestly, she should of left him in the first ten minutes. But instead, we get to watch her slow, painful decline.

The Sound Struggle is Real

What makes this movie so weird to watch today is the technology. They used a wax disc sound-on-disc system, and you can tell everyone was terrified of the microphones.

The actors stand stiff as boards, barely moving so they do not ruin the sound take. It is a massive contrast to the wild visual energy of late silent comedies like One Week.

Compared to other melodramas of the era, like the silent film Perdida, this one feels much more trapped by its own technology. Their is a constant hiss in the background that never really goes away.

Sometimes the sound sync goes completely out of whack. In one scene, Peony finishes singing a line, but her lips keep moving for another three seconds.

It is kind of funny, but it also shows how hard it was to make these early talkies work.

Butterfly Wu Saves the Day

Even with the terrible audio, Butterfly Wu is absolutely magnetic as Peony. She has these incredibly expressive eyes that do all the emotional heavy lifting.

The husband character is almost cartoonishly evil. He has this one specific scowl that he uses in literally every scene to show he is a bad guy 😠.

The film does not really have a neat ending, it just sort of stops when things get depressing enough. But as a historical curiosity, it is totally worth a look.

• Didja notice? The microphone shadow on the wall during the big argument scene.
• The audio crackle actually gets louder whenever someone speaks too quickly.
• The husband's friends look like they were recruited off the street five minutes before filming.