This haunting tragicomedy of a trumpet player (Zhao Dan) and a beautiful tavern singer (Zhou Xuan) is set among the lowest rung of Shanghai society in the 1930s. "Closely associated with the radical May 4th Movement, Street Angel ingeniously circumvented KMT censorship in two ways: by presenting its low-life setting as a 'world apart,' (and) by borrowing many of its comic and stylistic elements from 'acceptable' Hollywood films. Yuan is said...to have based his screenplay on Frank Borzage's 1928 film of the same name (and) the influence of Borzage and other Hollywood directors like him is...strong in the film's visual style: the frank artifice of some of the sets, the chiaroscuro lighting. Yuan is a great deal more direct than Borzage in presenting sexual incidents, as befits the film's emphasis on the abject position of single women in traditional Chinese society. And despite the pressures of censorship, the film is remakably bold in its implicit denunciation of the social status quo."-Electric Shadows: Chinese Cinema from the Thirties and Forties