As I approached the Ambassador Cinema, a flock of startled pigeons took flight with the first frantic burst of a Maoist song issued from a trio of loudspeakers on the overhang of the Astor cinema. The Astor stood across Nathan Road from the Ambassador. It was operated by a company controlled by leftists sympathetic to China’s Mao Tse-tung. The whole building was completely covered in red bunting, red lanterns with gold tassels and an enormous, brilliantly painted billboard showing Chinese industrial workers, women activists, People’s Liberation Army soldiers and peasants walking arm in arm. They were smiling because above them, where the sun should have been, was a golden cameo of Chairman Mao radiating the brilliant light of his invincible thought. The picture was titled Chairman Mao Joins a Million People to Celebrate the Great Cultural Revolution. It came with a “supporting colour short,” The Pearl River Delta Today, produced by the Central Newsreel & Documentary Film Studio. While such pictures were numbingly dull compared to the glamour, fun, sex and sadness of Hong Kong movies, they did find audiences with dutiful leftists who yawned through four performances a day and joined earnest discussion groups during the intervals. The propaganda music that came honking out of the loudspeakers pounded down on pedestrians packing the sidewalks, one more indignity of urban noise.
On the opposite pavement, a huge hand-painted billboard for Long Ago and Far Away completely masked the Ambassador’s façade. A three-storey painted billboard showed Becky in a head scarf, looking sad. The disembodied heads of supporting actors, comparative Lilliputians, floated in the background at odd angles, like runaway balloons. Long Ago and Far Away was a tragic love story about arranged marriage. It was as free of politics as the Astor’s Communist film was larded with it. The Chinese title of the picture gave a different angle on the story: She Must Smile at a Man She Does Not Like.
Fans were buying tickets to the premiere and I lined up to get one from the booking windows. In Hong Kong you still bought cinema tickets from a paper seating plan the cashier presented to you. You pointed to your seat, either in the front stalls or in the balcony’s Dress Circle. Before the Second World War, only the British got to sit in Dress Circle, but they really had to dress — evening clothes were a requirement of admission. Now everybody sat wherever they chose, and evening clothes for Dress Circle was only a peculiar, faint memory. If it was a quality film in a classy house like those on the Great World circuit, you might get a promotional gift with admission, such as a new brand of soft drink or a tube of lipstick. Great World tried tie-in contests — to promote Becky’s 1965 picture That Day at the Airport, which featured the repeated image of a wristwatch, Feng raffled off Tissots, the Swiss Omega company’s cheaper brand.
There were a few Great World performers in the lobby, mobbed by fans. I spoke to the company’s publicity chief. He was cagey and too much of a creature of his employer to reveal anything. I was getting nowhere. Then I spotted Netty Leung, a Cantonese star with Great World. Netty appeared in as many as seventy films a year. In 1964, she too had abruptly disappeared from the studio to flee her workload. She had been acting in three pictures simultaneously and her disappearance forced Feng to shut all of them down. A few days later, the general manager of Feng’s Malaysian theatre circuit spotted her in a Singapore restaurant.
Netty’s excuse for running away: she was just plain exhausted. Feng fined her six months’ pay as a warning to other would-be bolters. For half a year she was indentured labour at Great World.
“Have you seen Becky?” I asked her. I must have appeared so upset that Netty chuckled with embarrassment and bobbed her head to encourage me to find my equilibrium. Netty said she knew nothing of Becky’s disappearance. “Although,” she said as she went into the auditorium, “if she walked out, good for her.”
I was going to leave at that point. I didn’t want to sit around in a movie while my best friend was missing. I could hear the film begin with the familiar trumpeting fanfare of the Great World Organisation. Feng, who was almost pathologically vigilant about production costs, hated colour. Back then, Feng had to double his lighting budgets for Eastmancolor. He had shot his first colour production almost in defiance of practicality, using black-and-white-film lighting levels. The performers’ faces came out a bilious green, but, with typical patience, cinema-goers didn’t seem to mind. At first, Feng was going to keep working that way. Part of him did want his films to look better. So up went the lighting budget. Great World didn’t have a colour-processing lab for several years so Feng had to air-freight negatives to Rank Laboratories in England, raising costs and causing unacceptable delays. He ordered that all editing be done on a clipboard, with directors and film editors keeping track of film can numbers and ordering on the spot which pieces of film to use in the final product. Once the processed film was flown back from Rank, a Great World negative cutter pasted the picture together in twenty gruelling hours. Feng also committed his theatre circuit to wide-screen projection using the CinemaScope process, which he renamed WorldScope. Shooting was often rushed and clumsy, so the extremities of images were blurred. Again, Chinese movie fans didn’t mind - they loved the colour and WorldScope dimensions, the vast brightness a respite from their hard lives in the grey, cramped streets of Hong Kong.
I grew curious, standing in the empty lobby of the Ambassador, listening to the Great World fanfare. Feng had complained of the expense of reshooting the Great World fanfare sequence in colour: the old one had featured a revolving Plasticine globe hovering on a cloud of carbon dioxide. Technicians would have to go out to an electrical goods factory and buy a new electric motor to make the Plasticine globe spin because they had failed to keep the old one they’d used when they’d shot the black-and-white version. So he ordered that the spinning globe be ditched in favour of a beautiful young woman opening a fan in front of her face. Painted on the fan was a map of the world. She became framed by the superimposed Chinese characters Tai Shai Kaai and their English counterparts: “Great World.”
Then Becky was on screen and I confess that I so longed to see her again that I was willing to stare at her giant projected image as a substitute. An insistent usher tugged me to my seat. Long Ago and Far Away was Becky’s 190th film. The story was unusually sophisticated and represented a high point in the career of Becky’s favourite director, Chen Lo-wen, a veteran of the pre-war Shanghai movie studios. In it, Becky plays a tragic woman riding a train through the countryside. She sits at the window with her hair fashionably swept to the side and heavily lacquered, the way smart women all over the world wore it in 1967. Like all Mandarin-track movies made in Hong Kong, this picture never exactly spelled out where the story was set - certainly not Hong Kong, a small, provincial city that Shanghanese filmmakers such as Feng and Chen disdained. It was probably supposed to take place in some fantasy of a modern, affluent China, near a middle-class Shanghai-like city that had never existed, a conceit every bit as proud and weirdly unreal as the notion of making Mandarin pictures in a Cantonese market, or a colour film with black-and-white lighting. Everything Feng did was proud and weirdly unreal.
The device on which Long Ago relies on is that whenever Becky’s train stops in a station, she sees something on the platform that reminds her of her past. At the first stop, while a soft rain drizzles down the window, she sees a little girl in a fancy Western dress being tugged along by a happy father. That triggers a memory of the heroines own childhood. She had grown up in a wealthy home. But from early childhood her character has been pledged by her parents to marry the ugly, cruel son of a neighbouring wealthy family. At another station, there are two happy lovers pooling their pennies to buy dried salty plums. This makes her think of how she had once met a poor but kind and handsome artist with whom she fell in love long ago and far away, putting her at odds with her family and their promise to marry her off to the cruel boy.
And so the story