44 Films & TV Shows Set In Shanghai During The 1930s
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The Eight Hundred
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sBased on the true story of one of the greatest battles of WWII — In 1937, eight hundred Chinese soldiers fight under siege from a warehouse in the middle of the Shanghai battlefield, completely surrounded by the Japanese army.
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The Game Changer
Shanghai The 1930sTwo escaped prisoners join one of the most powerful gangs in Shanghai, the Green Gang, as the right-hand men of the head boss Mr. Tang. When Mr. Tang tries to gain total control over business dealings in Shanghai, he discovers his closest allies are not who they seem and turns against his own men to protect his power.
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The Wasted Times
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sSet against a chaotic, war torn Shanghai, “The Wasted Times” follows a local crime boss at the receiving end of the Japanese army’s attempt to forge a dubious alliance. Spanning three separate times during the period, the story details mindsets from various perspectives, all culminating in a suspenseful and tense finale.
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Phantom of the Theatre
Shanghai The 1930sA haunted theatre, filled with the vengeful spirits of a tragically-trapped performance troupe murdered in a fire 13 years ago, waits for the once-grand palatial playhouse to re-open with a new show - and bring in new victims.
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A Tale of Three Cities
Anhui Province Shanghai 🇭🇰 Hong Kong The 1950s The 1940s The 1930sA former spy in the Chinese Nationalist Party falls for an opium-dealing widow, as China is ravaged by war and revolution.
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Dangerous Liaisons
Shanghai The 1930sDangerous Liaisons is a Chinese film by Hur Jin-ho based on the novel with the same title by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos.
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The Bullet Vanishes
Shanghai The 1930sOne rainy night in an arms factory near Shanghai, a young female worker accused of stealing a box of bullets from the ruthless Boss Ding (Liu Kai Chi) is violently killed in a game of Russian roulette. Half a month later, a series of inexplicable deaths takes place in the factory, where the victims are shot but no bullets are found. Rumors of a deadly curse begin to spread in the factory, terrorizing the workers there. So, eccentric police inspector Song Donglu (Lau Ching Wan) and his hot-blooded, gunslinging partner Guo Zhui (Nicholas Tse) are sent in to investigate the mystery of the phantom bullets...
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Shanghai
Shanghai 🇹🇭 Thailand The 1940s The 1930sAn American man returns to a corrupt, Japanese-occupied Shanghai four months before Pearl Harbor and discovers his friend has been killed. While he unravels the mysteries of the death, he falls in love and discovers a much larger secret that his own government is hiding.
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Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
🇫🇷 France Shanghai The 1920s The 1910s The 1930s The 1940sSeven years after the apparent death of Chen Zhen, who was shot after discovering who was responsible for his teacher's death (Huo Yuanjia) in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. A mysterious stranger arrives from overseas and befriends a local mafia boss. That man is a disguised Chen Zhen, who intends to infiltrate the mob when they form an alliance with the Japanese. Disguising himself as a caped fighter by night, Chen intends to take out everyone involved as well as get his hands on an assassination list prepared by the Japanese.
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A Jewish Girl in Shanghai
Shanghai The 1940s The 1930sBased upon the popular graphic novel by Wu Lin, this is the first Chinese animated film to portray the Holocaust. The film centers around the warm friendship between Rina, a wide-eyed European Jewish schoolgirl and A-Gen, a Chinese pancake seller, who teach each other about their distant worlds as Shanghai struggles beneath its own cruelly portrayed Japanese occupation.
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Lust, Caution
Shanghai 🇭🇰 Hong Kong The 1940s The 1930sDuring World War II a secret agent must seduce, then assassinate an official who works for the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai. Her mission becomes clouded when she finds herself falling in love with the man she is assigned to kill.
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The Matrimony
Shanghai The 1930sTill Death Do Us Part — A woman finds the key to a room in the attic that her husband forbids her from entering. When she opens the door, she is confronted with the haunting existence of the woman her husband refuses to forget.
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Blood Brothers
Shanghai The 1930sThe days of innocence have passed. They must make their choices like men. But at what costs? Is blood really thicker than water? — Fung (Daniel Wu) and his best friends, brothers Kang (Liu Ye) and Hu (Tony Yang), leave the countryside together to make it big in Shanghai. Things aren't so easy in the city, however, and the brothers stumble and toil until opportunity brings them to Club Paradise and ruthless mob boss Hong (Sun Honglei). While Kang embraces his newfound power in the Shanghai triad, Fung and Hu are less comfortable with the crime and violence, sending the brothers slowly but surely down opposite paths. Fung falls for Hong's woman, sassy nightclub singer Lulu (Shu Qi) who is also involved with Hong's top henchman Mark (Chang Chen). When Hong catches scent of the betrayal, he sends Kang to finish off business, leading the brothers to meet at gunpoint on a cold Shanghai night. Set in Shanghai during the 1930s, the story is inspired by John Woo's classic work Bullet in the Head, released in 1990.
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The White Countess
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sIin 1930s Shanghai, 'The White Countess' is both Sofia—a fallen member of the Russian aristocracy—and a nightclub created by a blind American diplomat, who asks Sofia to be the centerpiece of the world he wants to create.
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Kung Fu Hustle
Shanghai The 1940s The 1930sSo many gangsters...so little time. — Set in Canton, China in the 1940s, the story revolves in a town ruled by the Axe Gang, Sing who desperately wants to become a member. He stumbles into a slum ruled by eccentric landlords who turns out to be the greatest kung-fu masters in disguise. Sing's actions eventually cause the Axe Gang and the slumlords to engage in an explosive kung-fu battle. Only one side will win and only one hero will emerge as the greatest kung-fu master of all.
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Jasmine Women
Shanghai The 1970s The 1980s The 1950s The 1930sZhang Ziyi plays the youngest of three generations of women who leads lives in Shanghai. Joan Chen plays the great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother. The film recounts this family, the mistakes they make, and a cycle that the granddaughter breaks out of.
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Purple Butterfly
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sDing Hui is a member of Purple Butterfly, a powerful resistance group in Japanese occupied Shanghai. An unexpected encounter reunites her with Itami, an ex-lover... and officer with a secret police unit tasked with dismantling Purple Butterfly.
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Shanghai Ghetto
Shanghai The 1930sIn 1939, the last hope for thousands of Jews lay in the last place on Earth the Nazis would look. — SHANGHAI GHETTO recalls the strange-but-true story of thousands of European Jews who were shut out of country after country while trying to escape Nazi persecution in the late 1930s. Left without options or entrance visas, a beacon of hope materialized for them on the other side of the world, and in the unlikeliest of places, Japanese-controlled Shanghai. Fleeing for their lives, these Jewish refugees journeyed to form a settlement in the exotic city, penniless and unprepared for their new life in the Far East. At the turn of the new millennium, filmmakers Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amire Mann boldly snuck into China with two survivors and a digital camera to shoot at the site of the original Shanghai Ghetto, unchanged since WWII.
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Eighteen Springs
Shanghai The 1930sBased on an Eileen Chang novel, a story of romance and fate set in the Shanghai of the 1930s. Manjing (Wu Chien-lien), a young woman from a once-well-off family, works in a Shanghai factory, where she meets Shujun (Leon Lai), the son of wealthy Nanjing merchants. Despite Shujun's reservations about Manjing's family (her sister, Manlu (Anita Mui) works as a nightclub "hostess"), they manage, in stages, to fall in love. The expected progress through engagement to marriage is interrupted, first by Manjing's ambivalence about taking this step, then by Shujun's rejection of her family, and finally by that family's baroquely conceived abuse and enslavement of Shujun. After a long period of seperation, Shujun and Manjing meet, but realize that their happiness remains only in memory, in a nostalgic re-imagining of opportunities missed, understandings never arrived at.
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Shanghai 1937
Shanghai The 1930sBased on Vicki Baum's novel.
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Shanghai Grand
Shanghai The 1930sGangsters abound in this lively, romantic crime drama that is set in Shanghai during WW II. The tale of Taiwanese patriot Hsu Wen-Chiang begins as he is washed up on a beach near Shanghai. He is taken in by Ting Lik, a kindly beggar who is desperately in love with Feng Ching-Ching, the daughter of a prominent gangster. It isn't long before Ting Lik successfully rises through the underworld ranks to become one of the city's most powerful gangsters. Hsu is beside him all the way and uses his own power to get revenge against those who tried to have him killed much earlier. The film's later focus is on the exploits of Feng who long ago had a relationship with Hsu when he was on the lam in northern China. Back in the present, Hsu and Feng meet again by chance and they resume their affair until Hsu learns that Feng's father is one of his enemies and kills him. Poor Feng goes mad with grief. Ting finds out and swears revenge upon Hsu.
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Shanghai Triad
Shanghai The 1930sIn 1930, Shanghai violence was not the problem. It was the solution. — Shanghai, China, 1930. When young Shuisheng arrives from the countryside, his uncle Liushu puts him at the service of Bijou, the mistress of Laoda, supreme boss of the Tang Triad, constantly threatened by his enemies, both those he knows and those lurking in the shadows.
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Fist of Legend
Shanghai Kyoto Prefecture The 1930s The 1940sTo avenge his masters death, He'll fight like never before! — Chen Zhen, a Chinese engineering student in Kyoto, who braves the insults and abuse of his Japanse fellow students for his local love Mitsuko Yamada, daughter of the director, returns in 1937 to his native Shangai, under Japanse protectorate -in fact military occupation- after reading about the death of his kung-fu master Hou Ting-An in a fight against the Japanese champion Ryuichi Akutagawa.
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Sanmao Joins the Army
Shanghai The 1930sIn 1937, after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Second Sino-Japanese War breaks out. San Mao, a wandering orphan, joins the army to participate in the Battle of Shanghai.
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God of Gamblers III: Back to Shanghai
Shanghai 🇭🇰 Hong Kong The 1930s The 1990sAfter the events in God of Gamblers II, Tai-Kun who lost his ESP powers has regained the abilities again and seeks revenge against Sing, the Saint of Gamblers. When Tai-Kun, aided by his fellow disciples, exerts ESP powers under full force against Sing who is doing likewise to them, the spacetime becomes distorted and sends Tai-Kun and Sing to Shanghai in 1937. Meeting his own grandfather Chow Tai Fook and the benign millionaire Ding Lik, Sing must deal with Ding Lik's foes and the Japanese military forces, with his "mistaken" crush on one of a pair of twin sisters, find out who defeated the French "God of Gamblers", Pierre Cashon, in that era (the mysterious "Comment allez-vous"), and finally find out how to travel back to Hong Kong in 1991.
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