Adventures in cinema: Cities of Love and Sadness

Granted, I was feverish. But these two Taiwanese-dialect melodramas presented by Harvard Film Archive were a trip. The first (above), The Husband's Secret (1960), had plot elements that reminded me of aspects of Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 (Kazuo Hara). No, there're no live births, but there are nightclub hostesses carving out communal living spaces and arrangements in parallel to the de/predations of their sex work.
The second (below), from 1965, May 13th, Night of Sorrow, rang some Mildred Pierce bells, sans pancakes, with its story of a sacrificing older woman working in a low profession--nightclub singer--to provide a younger woman, her sister, with all the advantages. Said kid sister is embarrassed by her sib's work, a snob and an ingrate, and, well, you know how these dynamics play out. There's a man, misunderstandings, a murder....
(The actress shown wearing glasses in the fourth shot was an amazing physical comedian, forever prat-falling into the glassworks at the plant where she and kid sister work as newly hired scientists and pulling unbelievably elastic moues and eyerolls.)