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Wang Yuan-Long

Wang Yuan-Long

Acting

Known For

The Migration Act
4.0

This partially-extant silent film focuses on the lives of people in rural China during the early twentieth century. Wang Guisheng (played by Wang Yuanlong) is an orphan who grew up at his uncle's, working as a farmhand. Since childhood, he has been close with his female cousin, Li Ah Zhen (played by Li Minghui), and they expect to marry. But when her mother dies of illness and overwork, Ah Zhen's father re-marries, and the evil stepmother connives to marry Ah Zhen off to the stepmother's nephew. Then a government representative comes to the village recruiting peasants to establish a new settlement on the borderlands, she persuades the despondent Guisheng to sign up. Guisheng leaves his love behind, only to find hardship on the frontier. Ah Zhen, who has fallen ill, is set upon by her groom on her wedding night...BUT the next morning his stabbed corpse is found in the bridal chamber and a body in a bridal gown is found down a well. WHAT HAS HAPPENED?!?!?!?!!

The Migration Act

1926Movie
Haunted House No. 13

No. 13 Baochan Hutong in Beiping was originally the residence of King Zheng of the Qing Dynasty, and became one of the top ten murderous mansions in Beiping due to the unexplained deaths of its occupants from time to time. A couple from Shanghai rented the house, and the old man on watch told them the story of the old house. When the Eight-Power Allied Forces invaded, King Zheng's father was dragged to his death by a foreigner's horse for not letting the foreigner occupy the mansion, and since then there have been strange happenings in the mansion. Zheng Wang's son, Weng, was not doing his job, and Zheng Wang could do nothing about it. On the night of the ancestor's memorial service, King Zheng died of spasms in his arms and legs. After the Republic of China, Weng was forced to sell his house, his mother hanged herself, and his sister fell into a brothel, where a warlord general bought her as a concubine, but abused her all sorts of ways.

Haunted House No. 13

1948Movie
Awful Truth
8.0

As China falls into hyperinflation following the end of the war, people fought tooth and nail to get their hands on the only reliable currencies in the world: gold and American dollars. This is a story that shows how seven bars and two thousand US dollars bring together an interesting mix of characters: an opportunistic manager, a materialistic courtesan, a con artist posing as a commissioner of the Treasury, a white-collar worker who will do anything for a promotion, a man who specialises in conning women, a father who marries off his daughter for money and a sorcerer who fakes his magic. In this dog-eat-dog world, the only truth is that everyone is lying for his own gain. Playing the courtesan who longs to be part of high society, Li Lihua steals the film with a feisty performance opposite the amusing Yan Jun, whose con artist character has a tendency to flirt with lyrics from Peking operas.

Awful Truth

1950Movie
Modern ‘Red Chamber Dream’

Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the big four of classic Chinese novels, has been adapted for film and television dozens of times over the past decades. Yet this sui generis Great Wall production daringly transposes the setting to modern-day 1950s. The contemporised story revolves nonetheless around the love triangle between Jia Baoyu and his two cousins. Both girls love him but his heart belongs to only one. The ending, however, is remarkably changed to separation of the lovers as a result of war—the war that was surely still haunting the minds of the filmmakers at the time when the film was made. Not only did Great Wall pour money into building extravagant sets just so to recreate down to the smallest detail the grandeur of the legendary Jia mansion, but the film also boasted of its lavish costume designs for the diverse female cast. (From Hong Kong Film Archive)

Modern ‘Red Chamber Dream’

1952Movie