General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Crossroads (十字街头) (1937 film)

Crossroads (十字街头, Shizi jietou) is a 1937 Chinese black-and-white comedy-drama directed and written by Shen Xiling (沈西苓) and produced by the Mingxing Film Company in Shanghai¹. It follows four unemployed university graduates in 1930s Shanghai and the romance between Old Zhao (Zhao Dan) and Miss Yang (Bai Yang), neighbors separated by a thin wooden wall who fall in love without knowing they live next door to each other². The film is considered a classic of the first golden age of Chinese cinema³.

Key fact	Detail
Original title	十字街头 (Shizi jietou), English title Crossroads¹
Director and writer	Shen Xiling, who also drew on his own experience of unemployment¹^•⁴
Production	Mingxing Film Company, Shanghai, 1937; 2,972 meters⁵
Release	15 April 1937, at the Jincheng Grand Theatre (金城大戏院) in Shanghai⁶
Principal cast	Zhao Dan, Bai Yang, Lu Ban, Ying Yin, Sha Meng, Yi Ming, Wu Yin⁷
Format	Black and white, Mandarin, aspect ratio 1.33:1⁸
Running time	Reported as 110 minutes by 1905.com and Virtual Shanghai, 108 minutes by the China Film Archive, and 104 minutes by the Festival des 3 Continents⁶^•⁸^•¹
Legacy	Remade in Hong Kong in 1955 as a Cantonese light comedy directed by Mok Hong-si⁹

Spoilers

Plot

The story centers on four young men who have finished university in Shanghai and cannot find work². Their paths diverge according to temperament. Liu Dage (Sha Meng), resolute and haunted by the lost northeastern homeland, leaves to join the resistance. Xiao Xu (Yi Ming), despondent, attempts suicide; Old Zhao saves him, and Xu later sells his university diploma and returns home. A'tang (Lu Ban), an optimist trained in art, finds work decorating shop windows, while Zhao takes a job as a proofreader at a newspaper⁸.

The romance. Zhao lives in a shabby rented room divided from the room behind by a flimsy plank wall. Miss Yang (Yang Zhiying, played by Bai Yang), a young woman who has come to the city for a factory job, moves in behind it; her nails hammered into the wall knock down Zhao's photographs, and the unseen neighbors begin a tit-for-tat feud². Because their work hours do not overlap, neither knows who lives on the other side of the partition¹⁰. They meet by chance on the tram and begin to flirt, each unaware of the other's domestic identity¹¹. When a hoodlum harasses Yang outside her factory, Zhao and A'tang drive him off, and Zhao and Yang fall in love⁸. Zhao, assigned to report on labor conditions, writes a series titled "The Misery of Women Workers" based on her factory¹².

The ending. Shanghai's economic crisis closes Yang's factory and costs Zhao his job. Newspapers carry news of Xu's suicide and of Liu fighting at the front. Friends bring Yang back, and the four walk together toward the front⁸.

Production

Shen Xiling conceived the film in 1936, after returning to Shanghai from the south at age 32. He spent time with young artists of the "Xindi Drama Society," including Sha Meng and Lu Ban, refugees from the northeast, and wanted to dramatize the contradictory feelings of educated youth of the day: patriotic fervor for national salvation combined with the pain of unemployment and the resulting aimlessness, which gave the film its title⁶. Shen put his own experiences into the script; like A'tang, he had once earned money decorating shop windows, and he had lived in the kind of poor neighborhood depicted in the film⁶.

The screenplay was written by Shen with Ling He and Chen Wu and revised and polished by Xia Yan⁶. Photography was credited to Zhou Shimu and Wang Yuru, editing to Qian Xiaozhang, art direction to Yang Jingxin, and music and lyrics to He Luting⁵. The inserted song "In Spring" (春天里) was composed by He Luting, with lyrics by the poet Guan Lu⁶.

Censorship. The film's path to release was obstructed at every stage. The script was cut by the film inspection authorities before shooting; after completion, the authorities of the foreign concessions made repeated cuts, removing meaningful shots and dialogue. Shen lamented that in the concessions his team could not speak a single line about recovering lost territory or even hang a map of the northeast⁶. Despite the cuts, the premiere caused a sensation, and Shen Bao devoted a full red-headed front page to large photographs of Zhao Dan and Bai Yang⁶.

Style and influences

The film blends Hollywood romantic comedy with Chinese social realism. The plot of two people who meet by chance, fall in love, nearly lose each other, and discover they have been neighbors all along was already familiar from Hollywood pictures such as Paul Fejos's Lonesome (1928)¹³. A DVD review notes that much of the humor follows the romantic comedies of Harold Lloyd and that the plot pivot derives from Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, transferred ably to a Chinese setting¹¹. The scholar Ling Zhang of the University of Chicago analyzes the film as an example of Shen's transcultural practice, in which 1930s Chinese filmmakers reinterpreted Hollywood and Soviet visual conventions to develop their own narrative and formal style¹⁴.

The film's realism is anchored in its setting. Location shooting on the streets of Shanghai was used whenever possible, and brief documentary sequences heighten the sense of contemporary relevance⁴. The reviewer for the Las Vegas Cinema Association describes a fast, Western-inflected visual style: montages of newsprint tumbling off the presses, an opening credit sequence of upthrusting Shanghai skyscrapers, diagonal dissolves, double-exposure dream images, and frequent wipes¹¹.

Reception and legacy

The film is regarded as one of the classics of 1930s Chinese cinema, named alongside Yuan Muzhi's Street Angel (1937) as a classic of the period³. The Chinese Film Database calls it a funny, inventive Depression comedy whose realism and hints of looming political turmoil are purely Chinese, and notes that it marked the emergence of Zhao Dan and Bai Yang as major stars⁴. Paul Fonoroff, writing in the South China Morning Post in 2010, called it one of Chinese cinema's most highly regarded pre-war classics and credited Shen with a balance of topical immediacy and star glamour that makes the film equal parts love story and political statement; Bai Yang was 17 years old in the role that made her a star¹³. (A DVD review gives her age as 16¹¹.)

Shen Xiling's promising career was cut short by his early death in wartime Chongqing in 1940⁴. The Festival des 3 Continents notes that he died at a very young age and describes Crossroads as his first and only film in this style of bittersweet comedy, praising the audacity with which he shifts scenes from one tone to another¹.

The film crossed into Hong Kong cinema. In 1955 director Mok Hong-si and writer Lo Yu-kei remade it as a Cantonese light comedy for the Bailaohui studio, moving the setting from war-torn Shanghai to postwar Hong Kong, adding a subplot of bickering lovers played by Cheng Bik-ying and Tang Kei-chen, and loading the story with social satire⁹.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026