Here are some interesting things I have found so far in the process of writing my undergraduate dissertation. It is a case study of a totally-forgotten 1967 Hong Kong Mandarin remake of Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce in the context of Cold War cosmopolitanism, a new version of Hollywood Fordism, and two housing bubbles bouncing repeatedly off of each other. To the IRLs who keep asking: 1) I am not sure how well it is going, it seems alternately fine and disastrous, 2) no I am NOT writing about Wong Kar-wai, he’s 30 years later and there are other films!!
Movietown
Movietown was the brainchild of Run Run Shaw, the canniest of all Shaw Brothers. He wanted Hollywood-level global prescience, so he constructed a huge residential studio complex in Clearwater Bay, Hong Kong. (I like this because Clearwater, in Florida, is the HQ of Scientology, and the common-ish Japanese name Shimizu (清水, literally ‘clear water’) = Jenny Shimizu who Madonna reportedly had an affair with in the 90s). Shaw was not the only producer in 1960s Hong Kong to resort to Fordist mass-machine moviemaking but he was probably the best one. I’m getting mixed feedback from my reading, but the general gist is that Movietown was up and running by 1965. It still stands and it’s very ‘opening sequence of Citizen Kane’. Obviously am completely OBSESSED by these photos taken by derelictplaces user HughieD:
(reminds me of a tropical-brutalist scene where I lived in Taiwan, photo prob in prev edition of this newsletter. I LOVED the vegetation in this part of the world, even more fun to imagine it cloaking various wuxia and melodrama productions)
(the OG screening room. I am not sure how I would handle having the chance to walk around an actual living-dead twentieth-century Fordist movie studio. I think my eyes would roll back and I would start uncontrollably chanting passages from Nathanael West)
(The SB logo was very clearly copied from the Warner Brothers logo. One quite condescending film scholar thinks their studio arrangement was uniquely Chinese-Confucian but it seems also to be ripped from the Warner Brothers, probably via Shanghai)
(Staff and actor accommodation. SB had its own star system and its own fan magazine, Southern Screen (南国电影))
Actress Cheng Pei-pei lived in Movietown and said later that she was completely shielded from the outside world. I don’t think it would have been a good life. A spate of mostly-female Shaw stars committed suicide in the Movietown era - urban legend is that the complex is haunted. Here’s a translation of a very harrowing article about it. The Bai Xiaoman story shocked me after I watched Li Han-hsiang’s Sinful Confession, the only film she ever appeared in.
Probably taken late-60s, reminds me of the collapse scene in Day of the Locust, a disastrous accumulation of absolutely everything in the world - melodramatic housewives, secret agents, naked girl gangs, Qing court children, Ming dynasty monkey kings, opera singers… that’s Jenny Hu on bottom left, she’s my Veda Pierce but considerably less evil
‘Guitar Warrior’s Record of Revenge’
I also thought this very large Johnny Guitar ad in a 1956 Hong Kong newspaper was cool. See also QUO VADIS (‘Record of a City-Burning Warlord’)
(La Liz gets a heart-shaped insert in a 1950 review of her Little Women. Did she know??)
Some good screencaps from the actual film
(Mildred (here called Wang Xiumei) before her husband’s housing bubble bursts. See full distended urban length of widescreen Cinemascope (here called Shawscope, used for all the studio’s films from 1965 to late 70s-ish I think))
(Joan’s Mildred opens a diner - the Mildred here opens a night spot frequented by US Navy sailors on leave)
(From the outside)
(Yes there’s a mother-daughter catfight sequence but not for the same reason as in the original. It’s v clever. No the Wang Xiumei actress did not beat up her real-life children which takes the Hollywood feeling away somewhat. At least there are no rumours. I did check.)
(Actual shot of me after reading current crop of ‘feminist’ ‘anticolonial’ film scholars and seeing what they have to say about Hong Kong melodrama of the late 60s. All of you are terrible!!)