“Muted color photography and painstaking art direction enhance this humane story about a shopkeeper's desperate attempts to survive financially in the 1930s. Lin bribes and grovels to the KMT authorities, and has few qualms about exploiting the peasants and small investors who provide his livelihood, yet remains an understandable (if hardly sympathetic) figure.
“This ambitiously conceived and directed film was completely untypical of the Chinese film industry's production in 1959, the year marking the tenth anniversary of Liberation. Fundamentally, of course, it is a denunciation of the ‘old society' under the KMT, but shopkeeper Lin and his family are at least as much victims as villains, and Xia Yan's script follows Mao Dun's original story in preferring to understand their lives rather than to condemn them without a trial... Not surprisingly, the film was one of the first to come under severe attack in the period immediately before the Cultural Revolution. Three articles appeared in the newspaper People's Daily in May and June 1965...charging the film with ‘beautifying the capitalist class'... The film is one of many that have been revived in China in the late 1970s.” --Scott Meek & Tony Rayns, “Electric Shadows”