Part I: Wartime Separation (Ba Nian Li Luan); Part II: Darkness and Dawn (Tianliang Qian-Hou).(Yijiang Chunshui Xiang Dong Liu). Breaking all box-office records, gorgeous and epic, this is the purported Chinese Gone With the Wind-with a few important differences, starting with its central position in the left-wing cinema of the forties. "If ever a film caught the spirit of its time, this is it. (It) is a sprawling, two-part story about a teacher who joins the Red Cross in the Sino-Japanese War, but loses his idealism in the dissolute society of postwar Shanghai. While his wife and child wait anxiously for news of him, he remarries into high society, settles into a sinecure of a job and takes a mistress....The social contradictions multiply inexorably up to the explosive finale." (National Film Theatre, London) "A pattern of cross-cutting between extremes of decadent luxury and abject poverty here became the structural mainstay of the film, and the decision to focus the plot on the moral downfall of its central protagonist gave the film a bitter immediacy not found in previous May 4th Movement films." (Electric Shadows)