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| singing behind screens
HIS OLD CHINA
Veteran Italian director Ermanno Olmi (above) wrote and directed Singing Behind Screens, starring Jun Ichikawa (below) and Bud Spencer (bottom right).
Filmed on Lake Scutari in Macedonia - so like the Chinese coast that Chinese extras flown in for the film exclaimed “But this is China!” - Singing Behind Screens starts as a stage show in which a young man (Davide Dragonetti) finds himself in a brothel where a pirate story is being told by an old sea captain (Carlo Pedersoli who, as Bud Spencer, was a stalwart of spaghetti westerns in the seventies).
Gradually, the stage action opens out into the real events, as the Emperor tries to do a deal with a pirate admiral (Makoto Kobayashi) who is backed by a powerful group of businessmen. The deal is scuppered by the pirate’s backers, who poison him - only to have his young widow (Jun Ichikawa, making her acting debut) take over and become the most feared pirate of the South China Seas…
That title
“The story of the film is very famous in China. An important Chinese poet - I can’t remember his name - wrote an epic and finished by saying that, from the day when, accepting the Emperor’s pardon, the widow Ching stopped being a pirate, the ships went back to sailing peacefully on the seas and rivers, the peasants sold the swords they bought to defend themselves to buy ploughs and cultivate their fields, and ‘the voices of women will make the day merry by singing behind screens’. So Singing Behind Screens means peace…”
Ermanno Olmi
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