Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas

The Reel Asian Exchange

Philippa Gates, Lisa Funnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415893541
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136591556
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This collection examines the exchange of Asian identities taking place at the levels of both film production and film reception amongst pan-Pacific cinemas. The authors consider, on the one hand, texts that exhibit what Mette Hjort refers to as, "marked transnationality," and on the other, the polysemic nature of transnational film texts by examining the release and reception of these films. The topics explored in this collection include the innovation of Hollywood generic formulas into 1950's and 1960's Hong Kong and Japanese films; the examination of Thai and Japanese raced and gendered identity in Asian and American films; the reception of Hollywood films in pre-1949 China and millennial Japan; the production and performance of Asian adoptee identity and subjectivity; the political implications and interpretations of migrating Chinese female stars; and the production and reception of pan-Pacific co-productions.

.

Part I

Remixing/Remaking Formulas

1 Hong Kong Noir

American Film Noir and Asian Innovation, 1956–66

Philippa Gates

The golden era of Cantonese film occurred in the 1950s and 1960s because of, according to Gary McDonogh and Cindy Wong, the confluence of three different factors: the creation of two major studios—Shaw Brothers Studio and MP&GI (later Cathay); the growth of small-scale companies and their output of cheap Cantonese-language films; and a shift to content that attempted to define Hong Kong’s identity in relation to both China and the West (74–75). As Paul Fonoroff notes, despite Hong Kong’s low murder rate and peaceful society during this golden age, its filmmakers offered Cantonese audiences in the 1950s and 1960s a spate of crime dramas (98)—or what Sek Kei refers to as “policier” films (35). I would argue, however, that these films were not uniform in terms of their themes, visual style, or tone, and varied from classical detective mysteries to film noir to police procedurals—all trends developed in Hollywood film of the 1930s and 1940s.¹

During the Depression, the predominant type of detective narrative in Hollywood film was the classical detective story featuring a sleuth–hero in the British tradition of Sherlock Holmes. These intelligent, middle-class, sophisticated sleuths operated in an America that was modern, urban, and, above all, civilized. In this ordered world, individual criminals created chaos by committing theft or murder, motivated by greed or jealously; to restore order, the amateur detective (notably not the police) successfully investigated the mystery surrounding the crime, identified the culprit, and had the evil removed from society by death or imprisonment—and s/he tended to do so with comedic humor. This myth of American society as mainly good with merely a few rotten apples that required extraction, however, could not hold up in the face and aftermath of World War II.

Classic noir has been defined by critics as a film movement (not a genre) that appeared on screen beginning with The Maltese Falcon (Huston 1941), achieving its heyday between 1944 and 1948, and concluding with Touch of Evil (Welles 1958). Film noir literally offered a dark view of the U.S. with its critique of society and the problems of postwar readjustment through a black and white, expressionist visual style. The world that the hardboiled private investigator operated in was not an enlightened one; on the contrary, it was one riddled by evil and, even when the criminals were brought to justice at the end of the film, there was no sense that order could ever be restored. Noir’s disillusioned detective, however, fell out of fashion by the late 1940s as social anxieties shifted from postwar readjustment and the masculine crisis of returning servicemen to rising crime rates and national security as the Cold War heated up.

The intention of the hardboiled detective story—and, by extension, film noir as adapted from it—was to bring greater realism to the detective genre. With its terse style, colloquial dialog, and tough heroes, however, it was just as stylized and romanticized as the classical detective story—just as film noir was as stylized with its expressionist style. It would be the police procedural that brought realism to the genre with a focus on the restraints of the law and actual policing methods. Exemplified by The Naked City (Dassin 1948), the procedural traded in noir’s dark view of America for a semidocumentary style and focused on teamwork, professionalism, and investigative technology as the weapons of justice. The police detective did not need the superior intellect of the sleuth or the street smarts of the hardboiled private eye and, instead, relied on the procedures of the organized police force and his own wealth of experience. As such, he represented an idealized image of masculinity as organized, methodical, and driven by duty.

These three types of film that I have delineated—the classical detective film, the noir (or hardboiled) detective film, and the police procedural—each appeared in a response to changing sociohistorical events and represent differing myths of heroism and law. And these three types—whether in isolation or intermingled—form the basis of all American detective film, and later television, narratives (even today). The export and popularity of Hollywood detective films overseas saw their influence on the crime films of other national cinemas—notably France and Hong Kong.² Joelle Collier is one of the few scholars to explore noir in Hong Kong cinema. At the time of Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997, she notes that there appeared a handful of “Noir East” films that employed noir conventions to deal with anxieties of postmodern Asia rather than postwar America—“transform[ing] the genre’s conventions to meet their own cultural needs” (149).³ According to Poshek Fu, those needs in the 1950s and 1960s included addressing Hong Kong’s rapid industrialization, economic growth, and social turmoil, including a “generational conflict—between rebellion and control” (71). Indeed, the cinema of the time explored (if sometimes only in an idealized manner) these Hong Kong-specific social changes and offered new genres, themes, and young heroes.

The detective thriller became a popular genre during the heyday of Cantonese film, especially as part of the output of the smaller film companies. While some were remakes of American films from the “Charlie Chan” series to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954),⁴ others were drawn from homegrown sources, including Cantonese Opera, radio plays, and crime fiction. What all of them shared, despite their origins, were characters, plotlines, and tones that echoed Hollywood’s crime films—although, as I will argue, not in a straightforward imitation of them but rather exploring local conventions and concerns. These films are not well remembered because, as Stephen Teo suggests, the perception at the time was that postwar Mandarin cinema produced “the legitimate ‘A’ features” whereas Cantonese film was the “home-grown poverty-row product” (43); however, just as Hollywood’s B films have been recovered and examined by scholars in recent years because of their sheer number and popularity, so too is it time to reclaim Hong Kong’s Cantonese films from the derogatory, and erroneously monolithic, label “chopsocky.” This chapter will focus on the detective films starring Patrick Tse Yin and produced by the Kong Ngee (Kwong Ngai) Company⁵ as examples of Hong Kong noir and contrast them to the police procedurals starring Tso Tat-wah and Yu So Chow that incorporated Hong Kong innovations, such as kung fu and female detectives as the law’s most effective weapons. As Law Kar and Frank Bren confirm, martial arts, horror, and fantasy films were popular genres before World War II halted production; after the war, however, new genres, such as the detective film, also flourished (145–46) and borrowed tropes from these earlier, more traditional, genres. In all of the Hong Kong detective films, there is a concern with Hong Kong-specific social anxieties and concerns—such as the clash of tradition and Westernization, as well as the younger and older generations—and, because of this, these films demonstrate how, early on, Hollywood’s film noir conventions became detached from their original social context in a type of neo-noir pastiche.

NOIR—KONG NGEE STYLE

“Dragnet” is probably the best-remembered example of the classical police procedural. It was a hit on American radio (1949–56) as well as on television (1952–59), with a brief reprise in the 1960s; more recently, it was revived as a film (1987) and two television dramas (1989 and 2003). The original television series was highly influential with its emphasis on police methods of crime detection and the terse, deadpan quality of its dialog and voice-over narration. In Hong Kong, the story Dragnet was originally broadcast as a program on Rediffusion Radio based on Sze-hung Ming’s novel Return the Jade Intact (part of the Sing Tao Man Pao series). The film version (Chun 1956) starred Patrick Tse Yin and was part of the “Dial 999” series of eight films (the film’s alternate title was Dial 999 for Murder). The dragnet of the title—as is so typical in Hong Kong films of this period—only comes into play at the eleventh hour when an anonymous group of uniformed officers arrives to capture the villains and/or save the hero; until then, it is the amateur sleuth who investigates the mystery. Yingchi Chu argues that Hong Kong film shifted from being a part of Chinese national cinema to being Chinese diasporic cinema by the 1950s in terms of its identity as a national cinema (xix); I would also argue that Hong Kong film was also transnational in terms of its cinematic conventions. Part classical detective story, part procedural, and part noir, Hong Kong detective films were blending together the three different Hollywood trends. Chu identifies 1956 as the key year that shift occurred (22); it is also the year that Hong Kong’s Dragnet kick-started a decade of detective films.⁶

In Dragnet, reporter Ling Wan (Patrick Tse Yin) investigates a murder when the victim’s stepdaughter (Patsy Kar Ling) is wrongly accused of the crime. In Murder on the Beach (Chan 1957), the police incorrectly conclude that a trading manager died while drunk driving and his cousin (Tse) proves that it was a gangster (Keung Chung Ping) and former lover of the victim’s wife who committed the murder. Both films begin the same: a phone call about a murder is reported to the police and a team of officers are released to investigate. In both films, the lead police detective (Lee Pang-fe) is a kindly, benevolent, father-figure to Tse’s youth heroes, but neither film focuses on his investigation. These films present the police force in the tradition of the American procedural—as an efficient, well-oiled, and well-manned machine, engaging in contemporary techniques, such as tracking and tailing, and armed with the latest technologies (always a car radio). Thus, rather than be at the focus, the inspector and the police force behind him show up at the right moment to pull the dragnet closed around the real villain who has been drawn out into revealing his identity by Tse’s heroes. His heroes are not always active investigators, but certainly men of action: they drive the plot forward through their romance with the most likely suspect and leap into action to protect the women they love. Borrowing from the classical detective tradition, the detective protagonist of the Kong Ngee films is never an official law enforcer, but always an amateur.

Crime of Passion in the Mansion (Chan 1959) follows the investigation of a detective novelist (Tse) who, by chance, witnesses a murder in a mansion (high-rise apartment building). Fung Ling-yee (Patsy Kar Ling) is convinced that she is the murderer but, in fact, it was her husband (Keung Chung-ping) who cleverly staged the murder to appear that way. In this film, Tse’s detective-hero has evolved into more than an action-hero: he sleuths and uses his knowledge of forensics to prove Fung’s innocence. He inspects the crime scene, sniffing Fung’s gun to see if it has been fired and concluding that the angle of the shot/entry wound and the discovery of a cigarette indicate the presence of a second person. He then traces the killer’s car by its license and links an earring from the scene with its owner. Last, he interviews several people connected to the victim and the case. Although technically an amateur, this novelist possesses an intimate knowledge of forensics and, with this focus, Crime of Passion adds elements of the procedural to the crime narrative.

Despite its title being borrowed from the epitome of American procedurals, Dragnet—as well as Murder on the Beach and Crime of Passion— looks and feels like Hollywood noir. Jazz music was used to great effect in classic film noirs such as Phantom Lady (Siodmak 1944) and, as David Butler explains, with the use of jazz in television noir in the 1950s, it became closely associated with noir in general (xvii). As Robin Buss explains, jazz became a prominent element in French noir films as well (50–52).⁶ In the Kong Ngee films Deadly Night (Chor 1964) and Black Peony (Chan 1966), jazz scoring features prominently in scenes of action and is alternated with a more traditional orchestral score for dramatic scenes. Buss argues that, in French noir, “jazz came to stand for something different […], something more emphatically American and ‘foreign’” (52). Indeed, in Deadly Night and Black Peony, the jazz scoring opens the film and, in the former, accompanies a Hollywood-style shoot out and, in the latter, the airport arrival of the young and rebellious criminal–hero (Tse). Several of these Kong Ngee films also borrowed a narrative structure from Hollywood noir—the flashback—to reveal key information about the past that lends to the solution of the mystery, which was accompanied by the voiceover of the storyteller—another noir staple. Flashbacks are used to reveal how or why the murders were committed in the Kong Ngee films Crime of Passion and The Thief with the Baby Face (Chor 1966), and in films produced by other companies, including Bloody Gloves (Mok 1961), Yellow Giant (Wong F. 1962), and Dial 999 for Three Murders (Wong H. 1965).

Classic film noir is associated with a visual style that creates a dark and foreboding mood and expresses the interiority of the characters. Advances in film stock speeds allowed for filming on location (vs. soundstages) and night-for-night scenes on rainy streets—all of which contributed to the feeling that darkness permeated the urban U.S. New wide-angle lenses allowed for deep focus cinematography and—along with low and canted angles—created visual distortion, suggesting that the noir world was somehow off kilter. Last, low-key lighting, and the strong contrast between light and shadow that it created, alerted viewers to characters torn between good and evil. While 1960s’ French noir and 1970s’ Hollywood neo-noir brought noir narratives out into the light—and into color—Hong Kong noir kept it in the shadows—and black and white.

Rather than the pervasive greyness of Paris in Le Samouraï (Melville 1967) or th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I. Remixing/Remaking Formulas
• PART II. Perception/Reception
• PART III. Female Fandom/Stardom
• PART IV. Emerging Subjectivities
• Index