Feng huo wan li qing

TOO LATE FOR LOVE (1967) is a romantic melodrama with tragic elements from Hong Kong's Shaw Bros. Studio. Like the previous year's THE BLUE AND THE BLACK (also reviewed here by me), this one is set during China's war with Japan during World War II. The director, Lo Chen, is aiming for a tearjerker on the same scale, but it's told way too simplistically and merely checks off the boxes needed for the formula without giving the audience any reason to engage emotionally with the story. When Sufen, played by Ivy Ling Po, begins coughing early in the film, we immediately get a good idea of this movie's direction--and it never veers from it. While her husband (Kwan Shan) goes off to war, Sufen is left in his mother's house and bends over backwards to try to appease the overbearing woman who shows her displeasure with Sufen at any opportunity, going so far as to turn away a doctor who has been called to treat Sufen's condition. "It's just a cold," the mother insists. Eventually, the mother, played by Ouyang Shafei, sends Sufen back to her father, who gruffly rebuffs the husband when he comes to get his wife back. The mother's behavior is so unreasonable with no discernible motive other than to pump up the melodrama that we are unable to suspend disbelief as the story progresses.

The battle scenes between the Chinese army and Japanese soldiers are pretty extensive and involve dozens of extras and lots of weaponry, ammunition and explosions. Sufen's husband, Guoliang Li, a Lieutenant, is much more courageous in battle than he is at home with his controlling mother and acquits himself heroically in the course of the action. Curiously, word of his exploits never reach his mother, his wife or his father-in-law. He would have been hailed as a brave patriot and heroic defender of his country, yet no one acknowledges this. Sufen's father, played by Ching Miao, is a high-ranking military officer, frequently seen in uniform and accompanied by an aide-de-camp, yet he's always home and never leaves for the front. Nor does he ever discuss the war with Guoliang. This struck me as very odd and I could never take the film seriously as a result.

There are five songs in the film. Ivy sings three of them, two being heard on the soundtrack and one sung on-camera to her husband during an idyllic nature walk. The soldiers sing a marching song on their way to battle and a group of schoolgirls sing a choral song as Guoliang passes them on his long way home with crutches after a crippling injury from his war service. (You'd think a grateful Chinese military would have at least driven him home with an official escort.)