With its huge influx of mainland Chinese after the war, Hong Kong’s movie industry expanded quickly, and musicals were the most popular fare. Resembling the Mexican cabaretera film, which explored the criminal underground of nightclub culture, and the only Chinese-language film in this collection, Tian-Lin Wang’s Ye mei gui zhi lian (US: The Wild Wild Rose) is a very loose adaptation of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, including several songs from the opera, staged as a gritty nightclub noir. The magnanimous Grace Chang plays the “Wild Rose” Den Sijia, the plotting singer-seductress who flicks lit cigarettes on the carpet and takes a liking to her new accompanist on the piano, Liang Hanhua (Chang Yang), who lives with his mother and is engaged to a sweet girl. When Sijia’s husband, nicknamed Cyclops (Tang Ti) and just released from prison, assaults her in her dressing room one night, Hanhua overhears the melee and attacks the man, accidentally killing him. In an instant, Sijia and Hanhua abandon the body and run away together, determined to make a new life for themselves. Unfortunately, the couple descend into a hell of their own making: poverty, prostitution, betrayal, alcoholism, and even more murder. Beginning with stylized opening credits as if channeling James Bond, the film’s first half combines outstanding musical numbers, light drama, and occasional detours into farce (two women in gowns engage in a fist fight and wrestle across the floor), but the second half dives into the darkness, beginning with Sijia’s visit to a dying woman whose small children cry for her to hold on to life.