"If ever a film caught the spirit of its time, this is it. Kunlun's second production 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 post-war 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." --NFT. "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..."