Seventh Heaven (1927 Film) - 1937 Chinese Remake

1937 Chinese Remake

Chinese writer-director Yuan Muzhi loosely based the plot of his 1937 film Street Angel on Seventh Heaven, though it shares a title with a different Frank Borzage film, the 1928 release Street Angel. Yuan's film, a tragicomedy, portrays the lives of the underclass in Shanghai, including two lovers, a returning soldier and his fiance, a singing girl played by then-little-known Zhou Xuan. Zhou herself was from a very poor background and in her youth had narrowly escaped a future in the sex trade, but she became one of China's iconic seven great singing stars on the strength of her performance, and the film became one of the last great hits of the First Golden Age of Chinese Cinema before the 1937 Japanese invasion of China. It remains one of the most acclaimed Chinese language films ever made, appearing at number 11 in a 2005 centennial list by the Hong Kong Film Awards, immediately below Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.