<A River Flows East combines the objectivity of the historical process with the legend of the characters' destinies, so that the movie embodies a moving emotional power. The artistic taste is timeless and deep, and it is a long scroll epic full of critical passion. Cai Chusheng, who attaches importance to the audience's appreciation and acceptance, pays attention to the study of the narrative tradition of Chinese art, and pays attention to the storytelling and interest in the creation of the film, making the film structurally rigorous, clearly layered, with twists and turns in the story and yet with a clear vein, which is a great achievement. In order to enhance the power of generalization, the film adopts a structural form of simultaneous development of multi-day plot lines. They are interwoven through Zhang Zhongliang. Zhang Zhongliang's relationship with his resistance wife, Wang Lizhen, his reception wife, He Wenyan, and the so-called fallen wife, Su Fen, twists and turns as the plot develops until the final three women appear at the same time, when the story reaches its climax, and Su Fen does not see the insults and blows and throws herself into the river to kill herself. These plot lines, which coincide, parallel and intersect, present a vast spatial and temporal background with aplomb, and expand the deeper message behind the whole story while providing ample opportunities for the development of the main characters' personalities. At the same time, the film is a star-studded, grandiose scene, with the epic nature of the perspective of social history, the creators pay attention to the content of the film with a variety of clues and material objects into their own emotional framework, the story is handled in a staggered and overlapping and natural and smooth, with a certain degree of strength, but also see the color of individuality, and in the social reality of the rich display of the life of the individual can still be felt in the characteristics. Thus, it realizes the organic unity between meticulous characterization and profound social criticism, and the expression of deep and wide emotions and broad narrative cause.
Director Cai Chusheng has a sincere and deep love and sympathy for those at the bottom of society who are struggling to survive. The skillful cinematic narrative techniques he invokes serve such emotional and ideological principles. In such an epic film, which touches on a poignant social theme and displays a broad vision of the entire era and historical reality, Cai paid attention to constructing a typical dramatic structure with a complete story, clear hierarchy, and clear contrasts and conflicts, while at the same time paying great attention to the expression and nationalization, and striving to infect the viewers with the inherent emotions of the film to make the work close to the broadest audience. The film's star, Bai Yang, recalled that Cai Chusheng "thought of the audience in every aspect of the film's conception; the audience was the ink in his mind, and he often used it as a criterion. The artistic methods he used must be enjoyable for the audience, but not simply to cater to the audience, but to teach and entertain." It can be said that Cai Chusheng understands the habits and psychology of the Chinese audience very well, and he is good at detailing and dealing with climactic scenes, and he often uses the techniques of rendering, arranging, contrasting, and echoing in his films, so as to unfold the intricate and complicated conflicts with a clear beginning, a clear end and the skillful use of drama. conflict, and skillful use of dramatic elements. How to utilize traditional Chinese techniques in the modern art style of film and how to gain 100% audience is the first and foremost issue he considers in his artistic creation. In his words, "for the benefit of the people, it is necessary to ask the artist to make his work understandable to everyone". This kind of thinking clearly embodies the deep-rooted creative plot in Cai Chusheng. The framework of the masterpiece "A River Flows East" is strictly in accordance with the principle of the law of dramatic conflict, focusing on how to tell a vivid and touching story, emphasizing the shaping of the characters in the service of the plot, and its space-time structure and audio-visual composition are also centered around the dramatic scenes. For example, a large number of parallel lens grouping to strengthen the contrast effect of the plot, suggesting the value of a particular narrative situation implied by the emotion, not only to tell the story, quite rich image tension, and "sensational effect" and its obvious. The movie also utilizes a lot of medium shots in the narrative. For example, the climax scene at the end of the movie, in which Su-fen walks into the ballroom with a tray and identifies herself with Zhang Zhongliang, is a medium shot. This kind of camera treatment contains a more complete panoramic picture, with a strong sense of contrast and hierarchy, and at the same time the dramatic elements are obvious, which is a more successful example of integrating dramatic elements into the cinematography. In addition, the film is notable for its atmospheric and epic pursuits as well as its poetic expressions and simple performances, making it a representative of the dramatic cinema of the 1940s
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