Long Live the Missus

One of China’s most revered writers, the great Eileen Chang (Lust, Caution) also wrote multiple screenplays for the Chinese and Hong Kong film industries from the late 1940s to the early ’60s; 1947’s enchanting, strikingly modernist Long Live the Missus is one of the best. Its heroines wear both glamorous cheongsams and tennis shorts, tend to the home and hop on and off planes, and pine for and pick up after men. Even Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck would find it hard to keep up in this eye-opening vision of family dynamics, sexual politics, and fabulous fashions in a thoroughly modern China.