Reviewed by: Stephe Date: 07/06/2011 Butterfly Wu is an infertile older woman who would like to adopt a neglected little girl (Wong Oi-Ming) who plays outside the stoop of the back entrance of the building opposite her building's back entrance. The girl's stepmother (Weng Mu-Lan) regards her with disdain and treats her with indifference, and her father (Cheng Miu) is a low-level Lothario. The older woman and her novelist husband Wang Yin -- who memorably played the father in the MP & GI Lucilla Yu Ming vehicles Her Tender Heart (1959) and Father Takes a Bride (1963), as well as in Education of Love (1961) and A Story of Three Loves (1964) -- through the intercession of the maids from the two households (Kao Tsiang and Ma Hsiao-Nung) and the blessing of father Cheng Miu, are able to adopt the little girl. Up until this point, the film has been heartwarming, but too pat and predictable. Making matters worse is the anachronistic soundtrack created to make up for the missing audio on the master film. All proceeds well until, one day, out on a walk with household maid Kao Tsiang, the little girl espies her birth mother (Lee Heung-Gwan), who is on a date with an unknown man. Butterfly's cousin Chiu Ming (1) comes to visit and bemoans how he is having trouble finding a suitable woman with which to settle down. Just as his visit is over and Wang Yin escorts him back to the back patio, the birth mother appears, whereupon the cousin stops a moment -- taken by what he sees -- before moving on. Butterfly is crestfallen when she sees how Wong Oi-Ming reacts to her birth mother's visit. Later on, birth mother Lee Heung-Gwan tells Wang Yin (Butterfly's husband) that she is a two-time divorcee and is not optimistic about finding a good father for Wong Oi-Ming. Eventually, Butterfly's cousin dates and falls in love with the birth mother, and the older couple sees their adopted daughter slip away, since the young couple would provide a stable environment for the child, and Wong Oi-Ming would be able to be with her birth mother. The denouement is unexpected, yet fitting, and stands in contrast to the way the story in Her Tender Heart plays out, where an older adopted girl (played by Lucilla Yu Ming) makes a quite different choice concerning her birth mother. It is self-evident that this black & white 1960 Shaw Brothers feature was produced in order to entice archrival Motion Picture and General Investment (MP & GI)'s core viewing audience, which was used to seeing their filmic tableaux in black and white, but the superior film stock and camerawork on display, made possible by the deeper pockets of the Shaw Brothers studio, makes for a conspicuous and wonderful change. There is an abundance of interior shots that show the older couple's living space to be more sophisticated than in any other MP & GI or Shaw Brothers film I've seen which takes place in a modern era. Clearly, a talented architect and set designer were chosen to create a specific ambience, and the results help anchor the performances. The film's director, Li Han-Hsiang, is perhaps best known for having made the award-winning Huangmei Diao films Diau Charn (1958), The Kingdom and the Beauty (1959), and The Love Eterne (1963), but a director is not a writer, so he is perhaps not responsible for the film's storytelling, which is obvious and lackluster compared with the sort of scripts that distinguished most of MP & GI's output. The acting is uniformly solid, but the characters are hampered by a one-note script that leaves no room for ambiguity. The end of the story reminds me of the MP & GI film Spring-time Affairs (1968), where a parting of ways is informed by a moral decision, but the resolution here connotes maturation instead of entropy. Ten minutes into the film, where Butterfly Wu plays piano while kindergarten children dance, we see a teacher guiding the children, flapping her arms birdlike, and then we meet the school's principal. This teacher and principal are played by the same two actors -- Liu Kei (1) and Man Sau -- who played Roy Chiao's parents in the MP & GI film Devotion, released the same year Rear Entrance was. Perhaps they are husband and wife, or maybe it's just a coincidence. Either way, it's interesting to note that their characters in the two films look almost identical. The woman who plays the older couple's maid, Kao Tsiang, was a MP & GI mainstay throughout her career, while the woman who plays the little girl's stepmother's maid, Ma Hsiao-Nung, seems to have worked for MP & GI from 1957 to 1963, and for Shaw Brothers throughout the fifties and sixties. Rear Entrance won the award for Best Picture at the 7th Asian Film Festival. Reviewer Score: 4