Hong Kong Leftist Noir

As promised, here's a look at a film that actress Shi Hui made for the left-wing Great Wall Motion Picture Company. These images are taken from lobby cards for The Young Heiress (1959).

According to a synopsis from the Hong Kong Film Archive's online catalog, Shi Hui plays the illegitimate daughter of a rich man. Before his death, he acknowledges her as the inheritor of his estate. The rich man's wife, aided by a group of thugs, tries to prevent Shi Hui's character from claiming her inheritance. In the end, she triumphs over the greedy wife and, desiring only the recognition as her father's daughter, donates the money to an orphanage.

The Young Heiress seems fairly typical of the crime films popular in Hong Kong cinema in the late 50s and early 60s. I've never seen the film, but I suspect that there is nothing that would mark the film as leftist beyond a generalized class consciousness. However, it would be interesting to compare it with the crime movies that the apolitical yet right-leaning Shaw Brothers was making at the time.





Here is a flyer for The Young Heiress. Notice how various images from the film stills are creatively used in the design.

Shi Hui: Revolutionary Princess of Hong Kong Cinema

One of the interesting tidbits from Paul Pickowicz's article "Three Readings of Hong Kong Nocturne" was about the involvement of Hong Kong's leftist film workers in the anti-British demonstrations of 1967. Prominent among them were Fu Qi and Shi Hui, husband-and-wife stars of the Great Wall Motion Picture Company. After a confrontation between Great Wall film workers and police, the authorities searched the couple's home and accused Fu Qi of orchestrating the riots. Both Fu Qi and Shi Hui were subsequently placed under arrest for more than a year.

According to Hong Kong film scholar Law Kar, Shi Hui played "an interesting role in the ideological landscape of postwar cinema. Embodying a middle-class persona without celebrating middle-class values, she provided song-and-dance entertainment in films that walked a tightrope between leftist politics and Hong Kong's increasingly materialistic lifestyle."

I'll post an example, in a few days, of the kind of films that Shi Hui was making at Great Wall.

Further Reading

• An Age of Idealism: Great Wall & Feng Huang Days
  
• Hong Kong Cinema: A Cross-Cultural View by Law Kar and Frank Bren