Mr. Wang is a bookish teacher at a Shanghai girl’s school, but the teaching job can hardly provide enough food for the Wang family. To make matters worse, Mr. Wang gets fired from his job for teaching Confucian “three submissions and four virtues” to a class of bored girls. Wang’s wheels of fortune are further derailed when his fat wife and slim daughter dump him for better opportunities.
Jobless and left on his own, Mr. Wang embarks on a strenuous yet funny journey to fill his stomach. In his trademark costume and make-up, namely wearing two moustaches at the corners of his upper lip and a pair of large-sized Chaplin-style shoes, tooth-less in the front, Mr. Wang lands a porter job by lying about his real age. But the heavy load of beer crates he has to haul soon makes it hard for him to act like a young man.
After being kicked out, Mr. Wang keeps looking for a way to get his stomach filled, doing different odd jobs here and there, including being a street vendor, a onetime fortune teller, and a rickshaw coolie. Every time however, fate is against him. Mr. Wang is either bullied by the police or ridiculed by street onlookers. With nowhere to turn, Mr. Wang tries to commit suicide several times, but even suicide fails him!
Mr. Wang’s wheel of fortune finally turns when a mailman knocks on his door. An invitation letter from a powerful old friend crowns him with an official position in the government. But it proves to be another strenuous journey for him to even get to the designated place. After overcoming a series of obstacles, Mr. Wang eventually finds himself sitting behind the desk of the solemn position. Dazzled by his newfound fortune, Mr. Wang starts looking for a woman of his desire, only to find that the summoned party is nobody but his runaway daughter. The film ends with Mr. Wang being kicked out again, meal-less and empty-stomached.
Mr. Wang Got a Meal Hardly is one of the many installments of the Mr. Wang series produced in the 1930s and 1940s. The first installment of the Mr. Wang series, simply titled Mr. Wang, was released in 1934 and helmed by Shao Zuiweng (Hsiao Tsai-weng, 1896-1979), legendary founder of the Unique Film Company in Shanghai and of the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong.
Adapted from the popular comic strips with the same title, the Mr. Wang series takes the audience through many funny incidents the title character experiences as an ordinary Shanghai “petty urbanite” (xiao shimin). To make his appearance and manner closely resemble that of the comic strip character by Ye Qianyu (1907-1995), Tang even had his three front teeth pulled, always wearing two moustaches at the corners of his upper lip. The result was a Chaplin-style clownish screen darling that with whom Tang Jie was forever identified with the audience remembering him as Mr. Wang rather than by his real name.
Shaoyi Sun