From the very first scene of the 1957 film Mambo Girl, we can see why Grace Chang — also known as Ko Lan — became the superstar that she was. The movie opens with the camera fixed on her ballerina flats and Harlequin print capri pants, on a chequered floor, as she improvises the first steps of a mambo dance. She sings smiling brightly, surrounded by a group of young friends, and her English name couldn’t be better suited to how she moves. Even if the movie is in black and white, her enthusiasm shines through as if everything was in bright colours.
The Mambo Girl, 1957 , with Grace Chang known as Ko Lan – Photo courtesy Far East Film Festival
The setting is a bourgeois, middle-class Hong Kong, with affluent young people eager to enjoy themselves. This is a feel good movie; the challenges Hong Kong was going through at the time, with hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into the city to escape the chaos engulfing the mainland at the end of the Civil War are left out. In the case of Mambo Girl, this was also a Mandarin-speaking Hong Kong, courtesy of one of the most important film studios Hong Kong ever had: Cathay Studios, originally known as MP&GI, which stood for Motion Picture and General Investment.Despite the hardships of the era, it was also a period of development and opportunity as Hong Kong rebuilt after the devastation of World War II and its economy expanded with all the new arrivals from the mainland. The story of MP&GI is one of Hong Kong in its most cosmopolitan, creative and optimistic eras. The company was founded by a visionary member of the Chinese diaspora named Loke Wan Tho, born in 1915 in Kuala Lumpur. His father was Loke Yew, a Cantonese businessman who had migrated to Singapore and then Kuala Lumpur in 1858, when both cities were part of British Malaya; many Chinese migrants arrived during the British colonial period, joining an immigrant community that had been rooted on the Malaysian peninsula since the 16th century.
The elder Loke arrived as a 13-year old boy used to farm labour and to saving every penny he could spare. He had a natural business acumen. He eventually became an extremely wealthy tycoon with business interests that included rubber plantations — a very lucrative business that made Malaya one of the most profitable colonies for the British — along with real estate, trade, steamships and tin mining. Loke was successful enough that when the University of Hong Kong faced financial ruin in 1915, just four years after its founding, he was able to bail it out with an interest-free loan. Loke Yew Hall in the university’s historic Main Building was named in honour of this contribution.
Loke Yew died in 1917, when Loke Wan Tho was two years old. The younger Loke was initially schooled in Malaya, but his fragile health made his mother decide to send him to Montreuil, in Switzerland, following medical advice that he could benefit from the pristine alpine air. He continued his education at Cambridge University.
Thanks to his father’s enormous fortune, the dapper Loke Wan Tho, whose international education gave him very broad horizons, decided to return to British Malaya and go into film production. He had to leave Singapore again during World War II, but the boat he took, which was supposed to take him to Indonesia, was hit by a Japanese torpedo and sunk. He was rescued by an Australian ship and travelled to India to recover from the injuries he had sustained.
Cinema was his life-long passion – along with birds, about which he would later write a book. He was inspired by his mother, Loke Cheng Kim, who enjoyed spending hours at the cinema, often taking her son with her. His family had already been involved in the film business before the war, purchasing movie theatres both in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, and this was the main business he took an interest in after the end of World War II. “Loke Wan Tho was super wealthy,” says film critic Paul Fonoroff, “and he was in the movies because he loved the movies, not because it was a business enterprise that could bring in money.”
By 1959, he had more than 80 movie theatres in Hong Kong, Borneo, Thailand, Singapore and various Malaysian cities. He chose to call his movie-related business Cathay Organisation. It was established in 1947 and he opened the MP&GI studios in Hong Kong in 1955.
At the time, Hong Kong was a hub of movie production in all manner of Chinese languages, from Hokkien to Shanghainese and many others, as the city was often the first port of refuge for those escaping mainland China. “Mandarin and Cantonese were the most dominant, even if Cantonese was mostly for Cantonese opera movies, but all sorts of Chinese languages and dialects were brought onto the screen by Hong Kong studios,” says Fonoroff.
Mandarin movies were “more prestigious,” he notes, as this was the language of the educated elite. The intersection between class, origin and language was not lost on filmmakers. The Greatest Civil War on Earth, an MP&GI film released in 1961, starring Kelly Lai Chen, Leung Sing-Bo, and Kitty Ting Hao, was a romantic comedy that made the culture clash between Cantonese locals and Mandarin-speaking northerners the main theme of the movie.
There were a few reasons MP&GI chose to concentrate on Mandarin-language movies. After the Communist Party imposed its regime of censorship and closed the door to movies produced abroad, the mainland market became off-limits, but the diaspora was eager to watch Chinese films. And while the Chinese diaspora spoke many different languages, many could at least understand Mandarin. Mandarin was also held in high regard by northern migrants, particularly the educated middle- and upper-class Shanghainese that had moved to Hong Kong after 1949, many of whom worked in the film industry.
“MP&GI showed a society that was aspirational,” says Fiona Law, a specialist in film and cultural studies at the University of Hong Kong’s Comparative Literature Department. The studio’s films portrayed an urban society, a middle class that lived in apartments, went to cafés and hotels, and lived a rather carefree life. “MP& GI was also trying to adopt the Hollywood studios operation, breeding stars and annual production plans, but very importantly, also putting on screen a fantasy of a very leisurely life.”
The studio wasn’t the only player in the film industry trying to bring Hollywood glamour to Hong Kong. MP&GI’s biggest competitor was Shaw Brothers Studios, established in 1958 by Run Run Shaw, who had already been active in the Hong Kong movie industry, especially producing Cantonese opera films. The Shaws were a business family that, like Loke’s, had its origin in the Cantonese diaspora in British Malaya. And just like MP&GI, their film studio produced Mandarin and Cantonese films while attempting to replicate the Hollywood star system.
Fans would select which studio they loved most according to which stars they liked the best. There was Grace Chang, of course, but also Linda Lin Dai, whose most famous movie was probably Cinderella and Her Little Angels, 1959. (Her story was tragic: she switched to Shaw, then ended her own life by suicide when she was just 30 years old.) Lucilla You Min, Kelly Lai Chen or Peter Chan Ho were other MP&GI stars. The Shaw Brothers had on their roster Li Lihua, Yan Jun, Zhou Manhua, Bai Guang and Huang He. As in Hollywood, the studios were very careful how the stars were seen: their private lives were controlled by their managers, who also orchestrated media contacts, paparazzis scoops and so on.
Hong Kong’s film industry was rounded out by myriad smaller studios, many of which specialised in martial arts or opera movies. There was also Great Wall Studio, founded in 1948 with a penchant for patriotic movies, and Feng Huang and Sun Luen studios, both founded by a group of Hong Kong filmmakers keen on showcasing political and cultural developments in Hong Kong.
Wild, Wild Rose, 1960, script by Eileen Chang, with Grace Chang – Photo courtesy Far East Film Festival
Though they were industry leaders, there were some notable differences between MP&GI and its rival. While Shaw Brothers soon established what came to be known as the “one week wonder” — films made in just one week to satisfy an audience eager for novelties — MP&GI took more time with most of its movies. “Loke Wan Tho was much more thorough,” says Fonoroff. “He paid attention to management, films would have a proper script, with famous writers like Eileen Chang or writer and producer Stephen Soong, hired as scriptwriters.”
MP&GI could take months to fine-tune its scripts, resulting in slower releases, but quite memorable stories. One of these was The Wild, Wild Rose (1960), with the script signed by Eileen Chang, again starring Grace Chang, and produced by Stephen Soong. It is a readaptation of the opera Carmen, by Georges Bizet, set in Hong Kong, with a lot of passionate scenes and dance numbers. (Many of these movies can today be watched for free on YouTube, thanks to copyrights having expired. Some even have English subtitles.)
The Wild, Wild Rose revealed a particular trait shared by a number of MP&GI movies: strong female characters, which Fiona Wong credits with “the women scriptwriters that had been hired by Loke Wan Tho.” While the early century had been a pivotal era in China for freeing women from traditional roles, the sensitivity to women issues brought by women writers created quite modern scripts that appealed to a broad female audience.
Underneath the happy, romantic, Hollywood-style production of the studios’ films, however, a more complex cultural political battle was ongoing. As the Cold War ramped up, studios like MP&GI and Shaw were considered closer to the US because of their Tinseltown aspirations. By contrast, studios like Great Wall, Sun Luen and Feng Huang were more closely associated with mainland China and produced movies that were “more vociferously critical of US and Western imperialism, including the spread of capitalist systems and ideology in Asia,” writes University of Hong Kong historian Stacilee Ford in an essay on Cathay Studios and the Cold War.
“The Cold War was a political arena captured by forces on the left and forces on the right,” says Derek Lam, a film instructor at the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Comparative Literature. The role of women, too was seen as important in this ideological battle. “MP&GI were more centre-right of the political spectrum and very aligned to a Western version of modernity,” says Lam. “These films projected a version of cosmopolitan modernity centred on female protagonists.” In this way, Hong Kong found itself at the centre of a very dynamic industry, star-studded, cosmopolitan and sophisticated, that could bring its viewers quite far from their daily concerns, while also subtly promoting a political vision which was in line with that of the colonial British authorities.
This golden age of Hong Kong film could have continued, but it suddenly ended in tragedy. In 1964, both Loke Wan Tho and Run Run Shaw were invited to Taiwan for the Asian Film Festival. While Shaw couldn’t go, Loke decided to join, along with his wife and his studio’s top executives. On the return trip the plane crashed and everyone on board perished. The company tried to hang on without its leadership, renaming itself Cathay Studios, but by 1971 it had closed down, with many of its remaining staff switching to a newer studio, Golden Harvest. By the time of the plane crash, MP&GI had made more than 100 movies that had brightened the fantasies of countless young Hongkongers, setting the stage for the kind of desirable urban modernity that would shape the local middle class’ aspirations.
What legacy is left of this joyful era of Hong Kong film? “For a while, the influence was seen in many TV series, up to the 90s,” says Lam. “For film, though, starting from the 70s, Hong Kong made movies in Cantonese. The production now was in the hands of second generation immigrants, who had grown up here and wanted to tell more local stories.” He says films changed under the influence of American New Wave directors like Martin Scorcese, whose 1976 movie Taxi Driver was an international hit. “The films got gritter and the main characters were more often men,” says Lam.
But MP&GI still held sway with some filmmakers like Wong Kar-wai. “He is the exception, and really goes after that Shanghai atmosphere,” says Lam. “Partially, it’s due to his own biography” — Wong was born in Shanghai — “but you can also see how much he tries to recreate some of those atmospheres.”
That Shanghainese atmosphere was mainly created by paying great attention to fashion, and by adding many scenes where the characters would go to cafés, restaurants and ballrooms, giving a thoroughly sophisticated and urbane feel to this type of movie. To drive the point home, Wong Kar-Wai even had actor Kelly Lai Chen act as the boss of Maggie Cheung’s character in In The Mood For Love (2000). He was one of MP&GI’s main male stars, also of Shanghainese descent. When he had arrived in Hong Kong he had enrolled at the studio’s acting school, which led to a career as the star of many successful movies, including Father Takes a Bride (1963) with Grace Chang and Golden Lotus (1957) with Linda Lin Dai.
And through Wong Kar-wai, the aesthetic of the Cathay Studios lingers on, prolonging this special moment in the history of Hong Kong film.