Werner Herzog
Monday, May 28, 2012
Inside and outside 'Wit's End'
"Empty moments have a strange secret beauty. Sometimes images themselves develop their own life, their own secret stardom"
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog
The 'Wit's End' Story
One of the first images in Wit's End AKA The GI Executioner is of an elderly Chinese man lying on his side preparing then smoking an opium pipe. Unfortunately this gentleman isn't a character we're going to learn anything about, he appears once more, at the end of the titles (about 70 seconds later) continuing his pursuit of opiated bliss (presumably for real) over the celebratory statement 'Film shot entirely on location in Singapore'. Aside from some interiors in the now long-gone Cathay Keris studio, this claim is true. Filmed in Singapore at the very end of 1969, Wit's End was the first American film to be entirely made in the Lion City until Saint Jack almost a decade later. The reason you almost certainly haven't heard of it is because it fell off the radar until the early 1980s. Exploitation film company Troma, who gleefully acquired cheap movies with some degree of violence, sex and grotesquerie, repackaged Wit's End as The GI Executioner (a title with no relevance to anything in the picture) and it apparently sold well on VHS (and is still available on DVD).
Back in 1969, this is the torrid tale of Dave Dearborn, a washed-up American journalist ex-Marine and would-be novelist-playwright running a groovy nightclub on a boat called The Junk; moored a brief bumboat ride away from Clifford Pier. After the aforementioned opening credits sequence (see above), we first get to meet Dave as he's being joylessly fellated by a local working girl (a real prostitute, according to the film's director). Dave, played by stage actor Tom Keena, is caustically depressed and seems to be at the titular 'wit's end' ("look what I ended up with, a lot of bad memories and this lousy bar"). Pretty quickly he becomes a pawn in a scenario involving the CIA, a local gangster, Chinese and Russian spies. He also has a complicated love life, moving from his local “maiden” to an adoring young American innocent abroad (Janet Wood), a buxom American stripper improbably working a bar in Bugis (Angelique Pettyjohn) and the Big Love of his Life, Mai Lee (Vicky Racimo), mistress of a local gangster, much to Dave's chagrin.
Tonally the film slips all over the place, from bleak, downbeat thriller to softcore farce and exotic espionage caper. Two or three set-pieces oscillate between high camp absurdity and sublimely lurid unpleasantness. Notably the protracted death of Angelique's character on the boat, completely naked and wielding a handgun (prompting the tagline "The Wildest Nude Shootout in Film History"); and the aftermath of a pretty neatly staged mini-massacre in an abandoned building which prompts Dave and Mai Lee to fuck (rather unhygienically) amongst the corpses.
The acting is uneven to say the least, veering from strained competence (Keena) and enjoyably game (Wood and Angelique), to dead wood (most of the locals, the expats and Racimo) and flagrantly atrocious (the guy who plays a British spy disguised as a hippy with a scouse accent).
Also it's impossible to ignore the relentless interrogation of Dave's sexuality. Mostly this is in relation to his muscle-bound 'Kiwi' friend Peter, whose murder sets much of the plot in motion. Despite the fact he has many female lovers, seemingly everyone Dave meets - the girls, the police, the secret agents, the antagonist and even Dave himself, loudly wonder if he's gay, culminating in a scene of leather-bound humiliation at the hands of a flaming super-criminal and his queer minion. It's a very literal enactment of sexual insecurity.
Unsurprisingly this jarring, schizoid work has a complicated production history which I've pieced together through research and correspondence with the director Joel M. Reed in New York (best known today for the notorious Bloodsucking Freaks), and Keith Lorenz in Hawaii. Lorenz is co-credited for devising the story along with fellow Singapore-based journo Ian Ward.
The idea to make a feature film in Singapore comes from Marvin Farkas, a Yank who'd got a taste of the Orient as a sailor in WW2, and returned in the 1950s primarily as a commercial photographer and news cameraman, based out of Hong Kong. As recalled in his memoir An Eastern Saga, Farkas had visited Singapore earlier in the 60s and been smitten. "Marvin said that Singapore was an old fashioned place with seedy cafes and opium dens," Reed says, "(he) had a studio in Hong Kong and raised the money from some old Asian hands." For the story and the script he turned to two young foreign correspondents, Ward and Lorenz, both living in Singapore and, in their spare time, running The Junk, a hip night-club-bar-restaurant on a restored junk-boat. "I had wanted to make a 1969 version of Casablanca," says Lorenz, who wrote a treatment which revisioned Bogart's Rick character as "a disillusioned American foreign correspondent escaping from his war reporting job in Saigon, and drinking and womanizing from a hammock on his junk in the Singapore harbor."
Although the archetype of the White Man Adrift in Asia was hardly original, there are faint pre-echoes here of Paul Theroux’s Singapore novel Saint Jack - a failed American writer adrift in Singapore who gets mixed up with gangsters and spies, and The Junk, while certainly not a brothel, with its “Malay carvings and bevy of attractive girls” (according to The Asia Magazine in ’68) might be some sort of floating precursor to Dunroamin’ – the idyllic club Jack Flowers sets up in Theroux’s book.
Lorenz first came to Singapore in ‘62 as a young advertising man then shifted to Bangkok ("much more wild"), before returning in ‘67 as a foreign correspondent for American media outlets. As Lorenz describes it, the late '60s were a happening period in Southeast Asia: "the Vietnam war was playing out, Sukarno was haywire in Indonesia, massacres in Java, remnants of communist insurgency in Malaysia, the residue of British influence (in Singapore), the rise of Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP, the flavor of a languid, low-rise, Asian port city with still a colonial melange... It was very special." And it was definitely worth trying to capture some of those flavours in a movie.
Farkas would shoot the thing, but he brought out a young painter from New York (famous for illustrating classic Jazz album covers) called David Young to direct. According to Lorenz, Young "came out to Singapore early for script writing, location scouting, hiring, and pre-production with my help," but he was troubled and drinking too much. He'd "just begun to get the ambience of Singapore when he sort of fell apart." Joel M. Reed enters the scenario at this point. The fledgling director had bumped into Farkas previously in New York and was recruited to track down Young, who'd returned to the city with Farkas's cash and a promise to write a producible script. Farkas joined them and Reed witnessed an almighty row between the two of them, Young demanding more money. "At one point in the conversation Marvin said, 'That does it. Joel's directing the picture.' I stupidly accepted and ruined a good part of my career." Although he’d started film-making for legendary skinflick producer Joe Sarno ("by accident" he says), Reed hoped he was heading to Broadway and/or Hollywood.
He read the first draft and saw that Young had "copied a script of Casablanca, changed the names, and moved the location to Singapore." Lorenz, who still has a copy of this draft, says it was faithful to his and Ward's original story. Reed began a rewrite, keeping the Dave Dearborn character and some of his dialogue and love life, while adding the spy plot and the more explicit sexual and violent elements to “perk up a rather dull script”. Although Lorenz and Ward’s place, The Junk would remain a key location, Lorenz wasn't happy about the changes. "He (Reed) persuaded the cash people to let him make it raunchy and campy, whatever you want to call it. He decided to be both writer as well as director, and got his way… I lost all interest quite soon... (and) it could have been great." Reed feels he did the best he could with the material, but "when I saw Singapore for the first time, I knew the whole script was wrong. The expats that backed the movie still envisioned it as a 1940s movie. Even Saint Jack didn't get it right."
Incredibly, given the censorship problems that Peter Bogdanovich envisaged when he was shooting Saint Jack a decade later, Wit's End was seemingly accepted by the authorities."It was an official production," Reed recalls,"The Government read the script and I met Lee Kwan Yew… (at) some sort of official reception… They had no trouble with the script since it was apolitical." Reed claims that officials demanded to be present only when nude scenes were shot and "I think our casting director got one laid in a dressing room."
The production coincided with an event that looms large in the secret history of Singapore's film industry - in 1969, Oscar-winning director Fred Zinnemann intended to shoot his adaptation of Andre Malraux's Man's Fate in Singapore. When Wit's End arrived to crew up, Reed says, "Everybody stuck their noses up at us…they all were going to be in major picture. We were peanuts." Then MGM abruptly pulled the plug on Man’s Fate (which was never made), "and the same people were soon chasing me down the street and banging on my hotel door."
Aside from the aforementioned Clifford Pier and The Junk, they shot in Chinatown, Bugis Street, rural Pasir Ris and Mount Faber, Reid Bridge and Boat Quay, Raffles Hotel (a scene in the temporary lobby), the Ocean Park Hotel (unconvincingly standing in for Raffles upstairs), a swanky mansion on Garlick Avenue as the gangster’s lair, and an abandoned, graffiti-strewn building in the Tiger Balm Estate. There are two lengthy scenes displaying young Singaporeans, expats and ‘girls’ wildly grooving to music - snapshots of how late-sixties hedonism looked in Singapore - one supposedly in a Bugis Street bar called Adonis, and another apparently shot on The Junk (which leads to a dreadful bit of continuity when Dave leaves the party at The Junk and then gets on a boat to… The Junk). There are also several scenes in depopulated back alleys, and many of the locations have a ‘dead’ atmosphere, as if the city has been emptied of all but a few self-conscious extras, although occasionally a child or an old man can be seen half-hiding within a frame.
Long passages of the film are sluggish, and after looking at the sequences closely, you notice how scenes have been elongated. Much of the time characters enter and exit rooms, kickstarting scenes that could begin much later and resolving scenes that have long outstayed their welcome. Often, even the briefest of scenes begins and ends on an ‘empty’ frame. This may be less a stylistic device and more a way of ‘padding’ out meagre footage. But unknowingly this becomes a gift to those of us looking from a different perspective, the fascinated watchers from the future, who see every second of Wit's End as a rare and precious document of what Singapore was during Christmas 1969, a world that’s almost entirely disappeared, but shimmers back to life for a moment, thanks to this largely thankless film.
Back then The Straits Times blessed (or cursed) the production with some breathlessly enthusiastic coverage, including an interview with Tom Keena who declared straight-faced that he was so immersed in the role that “I am Dearborn now.” Six months later, a writer for (long defunct) local entertainment magazine Fanfare travelled to Hong Kong to ask one of the producers, Michel Renard, what was going on. Renard’s confident that it will “go well in the States” (“… and I hear our color’s supposed to be good too.”) and that Singapore won’t get to see itself “mirrored on the celluloid screen” (the reporters phrase) until early 1971.
Actually, Singapore never got to see Wit’s End, and still hasn’t to this day. The film had a Stateside release in 1973 under the title Dragon Lady (“packs the punch of the Orient!”) but more or less disappeared. Then Farkas’s brother sold it to Troma in the 80s and it was revived and reissued as The GI Executioner with a tagline designed to suggest Death Wish in the Far East, “They tried to kill him ... drug him, torture and pervert him, but they could not stop the one-man execution squad...”
For his part, Reed, who promises more stories about the film in his autobiography, "had a wonderful time and saw a little of the old Singapore and made many friends." The place made enough of an impression for him to write "a light hearted mystery play taking place in an old Mansion on East Coast Road which manages to combine both the old and new."
Lorenz didn't see it until the '90s, when Reed sent him a tape, and although he disliked the film, "It was nostalgic seeing the Junk and the old Singapore that I knew. Some of Dearborn's lines conveyed what I had intended: a disgruntled, disillusioned war correspondent who had enough of the horror of war, and just wanted to hang loose on a boat."
Huge thanks to Joel M. Reed and Keith Lorenz.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Smith and Jones Run Amok
Cinq Gars Pour Singapour, France, directed by Bernard Toublanc-Michel (1967)
This piece was commissioned for the National Museum of Singapore's Film Quarterly, a new publication that will complement the programming of the Cinematheque. Cinq gars, sadly is not showing at the Museum any time soon, but you can view a watchable dub of it on YouTube, see above.
Once upon a time, if you were making a film and wanted to conjure up Singapore, you only needed the residents of your local Chinatown, a job-lot of wooden planks, bits and pieces from the fancy-dress shop and a parrot. But post-war, or specifically post-Independence Singapore, was a different entity. It demanded to be visited rather than imagined; it had textures and atmospheres that no studio carpenter could recreate. With affordable air tickets film-makers could be tourists, breaking into far-flung tropical countries with suitcases full of cash, phone numbers of fixers, lightweight cameras and the gift of the gab. No wonder so many foreign-made films from the 1960s shot in Singapore concern espionage and secret missions. Travelling light but with an agenda was glamorous – they felt like spies, they were spies, capturing images like secrets. Cinq gars pour Singapour (neatly translated, with rhyme intact, to Five Ashore In Singapore) is already a double-agent, a French film pretending to be American. The motley crew of actors belong to various and mixed nationalities, and I haven’t even mentioned the Swedish-French blonde bombshell and the Italian heavy who plays a Chinese bad guy. Somehow the hybridity of these sorts of bizarre Euro co-productions filters all the way through the credits.
Filmed (I assume) in 1966 and directed by Bernard Toublanc-Michel, previously assistant to nouvelle vague luminaries Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda, the film’s story is adapted from a Jean Bruce paperback published in 1959. Bruce was the creator of the ‘French James Bond’, OSS 117, to whom there’s a none-too-subtle nod during the opening credits, when the film’s protagonist, the blandly titled and performed Art Smith (played by Sean Flynn, more later) is picked up at Payar Lebar Airport by a car parked in lot number 117.
Cinq gars enjoys the spectacle of arriving in Singapore so much that Art Smith enters twice. Once by plane, complete with bureaucratic close-ups of entry visas, when he’s told by a knowing local girl that “we have Smiths and Browns arriving everyday”, and later by boat after a rendezvous with the other four titular Marines, dropping anchor at Collyer Quay. This latter sequence, in terms of its historical documentation of Singapore, is the film’s highlight. The now-demolished Quay itself teems with people, and our five guys strut their stuff through the beautiful entrance hall while the film’s title song promises “Somewhere in Singapore… we’ll find pretty girls.” The camerawork is loose, handheld and buzzed on the energy of a new place and experience. They hit the street, jostled by trishaw hustlers, and jaywalk over to the General Post Office (now The Fullerton Hotel, a few feet from where Saint Jack told the CIA to “fuck it” a decade later), diving into a labyrinth of street stalls, shops, heat and food. The cameraman captures all this lurking behind pillars, shooting across roads, leaning out of the windows of higher buildings. It’s guerrilla and gorilla film-making, as the actors-playing-Marines leer at local girls, marvel dumbly at tat in the shops and gape incredulously at a noodle-consuming pedestrian.
The film was shot entirely on location, and there’s a tension between the roving eye of Jean Charvein, the cinematographer, regarding Singapore as a landscape to be absorbed and recorded in all its myriad wonders, and the two-fisted narrative, which casts various sites around the island as an arbitrary series of obstacles and props to be smashed over and destroyed.
The plot is simple and goofy. Seventeen Marines on shore leave in Singapore have gone missing in a month. Art Smith’s sent to solve the mystery, with four tough guy Marines led by Kevin (Marc Michel slumming it after being Jacques Demy’s leading man and the enigmatic prisoner in Jacques Becker’s Le Trou), who tells Smith that the missing men “dissolve in the midst of revelry” after getting drunk and meeting a girl “or something that approximately resembles one”. Singapore, a zone of escape and erotic possibility, has become a new, covert battlefield.
So, our five heroes, including English boxer Terry Downes (with incomprehensible cockney drawl) and Denis Berry, the French-born son of blacklisted American director John Berry, hit town, pretending to be regular Marines. They’re as charmless and wooden as porn actors. Dialogue is painfully stilted and highly functional (lots of numbers, orders and repetition). In the lead, Sean Flynn, seems coolly disinterested in being charismatic, acting to cash in on his father’s name (his first lead role was as Son of Captain Blood). Cinq gars was his last film and it’s as if he quit before the shoot started. Just four years later he would disappear completely, into the badlands of Cambodia as a photo-journalist, never to be seen again.
Before long the lads are creating havoc around Chinatown. They start a trishaw race, drunkenly goading the poor drivers. During this raucous ‘comedy’ there’s a blinking cutaway to a handle-bar, and for a split-second we see a metal-framed family photograph belonging to a driver. A sliver of documented humanity caught on the fly. They hide from police in a cinema that has a ‘Majulah Singapura’ banner hanging above the box office, a reminder of the country’s freshly independent status (that and the predominance of Malay spoken by both police and villains). On screen there’s a newsreel about the Vietnam war; Toublan-Michel’s attempt, albeit briefly, to problematise the military fun and games. Indeed, the next section of the film, where the Marines hit a sleazy dive (‘The Paradise Limited’) and bully a luckless mama-san, rejecting the “ready for Boogie street” hostesses as too ugly, and start a demented fight with the girls (fists versus stilettos), carries an authentic whiff of the nihilism, racism, violence and misogyny of an American soldier letting off steam in Asia. As Monika, the film’s archetypal Caucasian woman in a cheongsam, comments in a show-stopping monologue, these men aren’t interested in the beauty of women, only “the smell of death”.
The team are desperately trying to get kidnapped, and finally they get their wish, intoxicated by loudly bubbling champagne and “pretty girls” (one of whom, we’re told, had danced with William Holden) in a ‘Private Club’ (a hotel restaurant) belonging to a fez-wearing smoothie improbably named Ten-Sin (all the ‘Chinese’ characters have these kinds of names). Events escalate and gradually, through a series of interminable fist fights, gun fights, explosions, torture sequences and chases, we travel vicariously around Singapore in ’66, wishing we were in the company of less brutal, more appreciative tourists.
They fight on a beach on the East Coast at dawn; clean up in a suite at the now-demolished Cathay Hotel (where the windows are cleaned by Samsui women), track down information at Pulau Brani, the kampong on water, which features some stunning footage before a house is blown up; they gatecrash the mama-san’s funeral in Chinatown, harassing an elderly Chinese woman who actually gets some lines; they run around the lushly green and jungly Keppel Golf Course, and finally get to a vast mansion in Telok Blangah, the villain’s lair.
Ta-Chouen (played by Italian b-movie veteran, Andrea Aurelia) is a tubby Fu-Manchu first seen draped on a circular bed, smoking opium and surrounded by half-naked girls, leading our amoral heroes to declare him “a gentleman of good taste”. One of the harem is the aforementioned Monika (the extraordinarily intense Marika Green, from Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket and aunt of Eva Green), who shows up teasingly throughout the film. When Art Smith confronts her on the bed, silently angry at her sexual betrayal (sleeping with the enemy and a Chinese), it’s the film’s only dramatic moment, cutting back and forth between their impassive, beautiful faces. The soldiers torture Ta-Chouen in his own chamber (with electrodes to his head and punches to the face), until they find out about a new rendezvous on the beach (rustic Sentosa this time). In a pleasantly realistic detail, Ta-Chouen smuggles comatose Marines out of Singapore in the back of a ‘Cold Storage’ truck belonging to Kun & Company (2 Kuching Road, Singapore 4). Finally Art Smith and a buddy discover the missing Marines’ fate, to be kept on a tanker out to sea in the ship’s deep freezer. The soldiers are literally kept on ice, part of some diabolical experiment of Ta-Chouen’s. After all the action and forward momentum of the film, it’s appropriate that the heroes should spend the last ten minutes stuck in a dark room slowly freezing to death. The meat-headed become meat. Or they would have done if they weren’t rescued. By the preposterous closing, Art Smith and Monika are in loving embrace and all the soldiers are apparently defrosted.
The problem with Cinq gars is not it’s inherently colonial view of Singapore as an exotic playground for male adventure, which could so easily have been simulated in a studio backlot, but rather that at times the Singapore in the film is proved to be so tantalisingly real. It breathes, and the camera is present to capture the moments, the details and the expressions, but then we return to these dead-faced young men and their search for more dead-faced young men. We are shown but kept distant from the life of the city in 1966, a vanished place and a people we want to properly encounter, not just the Smiths and Jones who still arrive every day.
Many thanks to Vinita Ramani for getting me to write this.
This piece was commissioned for the National Museum of Singapore's Film Quarterly, a new publication that will complement the programming of the Cinematheque. Cinq gars, sadly is not showing at the Museum any time soon, but you can view a watchable dub of it on YouTube, see above.
Once upon a time, if you were making a film and wanted to conjure up Singapore, you only needed the residents of your local Chinatown, a job-lot of wooden planks, bits and pieces from the fancy-dress shop and a parrot. But post-war, or specifically post-Independence Singapore, was a different entity. It demanded to be visited rather than imagined; it had textures and atmospheres that no studio carpenter could recreate. With affordable air tickets film-makers could be tourists, breaking into far-flung tropical countries with suitcases full of cash, phone numbers of fixers, lightweight cameras and the gift of the gab. No wonder so many foreign-made films from the 1960s shot in Singapore concern espionage and secret missions. Travelling light but with an agenda was glamorous – they felt like spies, they were spies, capturing images like secrets. Cinq gars pour Singapour (neatly translated, with rhyme intact, to Five Ashore In Singapore) is already a double-agent, a French film pretending to be American. The motley crew of actors belong to various and mixed nationalities, and I haven’t even mentioned the Swedish-French blonde bombshell and the Italian heavy who plays a Chinese bad guy. Somehow the hybridity of these sorts of bizarre Euro co-productions filters all the way through the credits.
Filmed (I assume) in 1966 and directed by Bernard Toublanc-Michel, previously assistant to nouvelle vague luminaries Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda, the film’s story is adapted from a Jean Bruce paperback published in 1959. Bruce was the creator of the ‘French James Bond’, OSS 117, to whom there’s a none-too-subtle nod during the opening credits, when the film’s protagonist, the blandly titled and performed Art Smith (played by Sean Flynn, more later) is picked up at Payar Lebar Airport by a car parked in lot number 117.
Cinq gars enjoys the spectacle of arriving in Singapore so much that Art Smith enters twice. Once by plane, complete with bureaucratic close-ups of entry visas, when he’s told by a knowing local girl that “we have Smiths and Browns arriving everyday”, and later by boat after a rendezvous with the other four titular Marines, dropping anchor at Collyer Quay. This latter sequence, in terms of its historical documentation of Singapore, is the film’s highlight. The now-demolished Quay itself teems with people, and our five guys strut their stuff through the beautiful entrance hall while the film’s title song promises “Somewhere in Singapore… we’ll find pretty girls.” The camerawork is loose, handheld and buzzed on the energy of a new place and experience. They hit the street, jostled by trishaw hustlers, and jaywalk over to the General Post Office (now The Fullerton Hotel, a few feet from where Saint Jack told the CIA to “fuck it” a decade later), diving into a labyrinth of street stalls, shops, heat and food. The cameraman captures all this lurking behind pillars, shooting across roads, leaning out of the windows of higher buildings. It’s guerrilla and gorilla film-making, as the actors-playing-Marines leer at local girls, marvel dumbly at tat in the shops and gape incredulously at a noodle-consuming pedestrian.
The film was shot entirely on location, and there’s a tension between the roving eye of Jean Charvein, the cinematographer, regarding Singapore as a landscape to be absorbed and recorded in all its myriad wonders, and the two-fisted narrative, which casts various sites around the island as an arbitrary series of obstacles and props to be smashed over and destroyed.
The plot is simple and goofy. Seventeen Marines on shore leave in Singapore have gone missing in a month. Art Smith’s sent to solve the mystery, with four tough guy Marines led by Kevin (Marc Michel slumming it after being Jacques Demy’s leading man and the enigmatic prisoner in Jacques Becker’s Le Trou), who tells Smith that the missing men “dissolve in the midst of revelry” after getting drunk and meeting a girl “or something that approximately resembles one”. Singapore, a zone of escape and erotic possibility, has become a new, covert battlefield.
So, our five heroes, including English boxer Terry Downes (with incomprehensible cockney drawl) and Denis Berry, the French-born son of blacklisted American director John Berry, hit town, pretending to be regular Marines. They’re as charmless and wooden as porn actors. Dialogue is painfully stilted and highly functional (lots of numbers, orders and repetition). In the lead, Sean Flynn, seems coolly disinterested in being charismatic, acting to cash in on his father’s name (his first lead role was as Son of Captain Blood). Cinq gars was his last film and it’s as if he quit before the shoot started. Just four years later he would disappear completely, into the badlands of Cambodia as a photo-journalist, never to be seen again.
Before long the lads are creating havoc around Chinatown. They start a trishaw race, drunkenly goading the poor drivers. During this raucous ‘comedy’ there’s a blinking cutaway to a handle-bar, and for a split-second we see a metal-framed family photograph belonging to a driver. A sliver of documented humanity caught on the fly. They hide from police in a cinema that has a ‘Majulah Singapura’ banner hanging above the box office, a reminder of the country’s freshly independent status (that and the predominance of Malay spoken by both police and villains). On screen there’s a newsreel about the Vietnam war; Toublan-Michel’s attempt, albeit briefly, to problematise the military fun and games. Indeed, the next section of the film, where the Marines hit a sleazy dive (‘The Paradise Limited’) and bully a luckless mama-san, rejecting the “ready for Boogie street” hostesses as too ugly, and start a demented fight with the girls (fists versus stilettos), carries an authentic whiff of the nihilism, racism, violence and misogyny of an American soldier letting off steam in Asia. As Monika, the film’s archetypal Caucasian woman in a cheongsam, comments in a show-stopping monologue, these men aren’t interested in the beauty of women, only “the smell of death”.
The team are desperately trying to get kidnapped, and finally they get their wish, intoxicated by loudly bubbling champagne and “pretty girls” (one of whom, we’re told, had danced with William Holden) in a ‘Private Club’ (a hotel restaurant) belonging to a fez-wearing smoothie improbably named Ten-Sin (all the ‘Chinese’ characters have these kinds of names). Events escalate and gradually, through a series of interminable fist fights, gun fights, explosions, torture sequences and chases, we travel vicariously around Singapore in ’66, wishing we were in the company of less brutal, more appreciative tourists.
They fight on a beach on the East Coast at dawn; clean up in a suite at the now-demolished Cathay Hotel (where the windows are cleaned by Samsui women), track down information at Pulau Brani, the kampong on water, which features some stunning footage before a house is blown up; they gatecrash the mama-san’s funeral in Chinatown, harassing an elderly Chinese woman who actually gets some lines; they run around the lushly green and jungly Keppel Golf Course, and finally get to a vast mansion in Telok Blangah, the villain’s lair.
Ta-Chouen (played by Italian b-movie veteran, Andrea Aurelia) is a tubby Fu-Manchu first seen draped on a circular bed, smoking opium and surrounded by half-naked girls, leading our amoral heroes to declare him “a gentleman of good taste”. One of the harem is the aforementioned Monika (the extraordinarily intense Marika Green, from Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket and aunt of Eva Green), who shows up teasingly throughout the film. When Art Smith confronts her on the bed, silently angry at her sexual betrayal (sleeping with the enemy and a Chinese), it’s the film’s only dramatic moment, cutting back and forth between their impassive, beautiful faces. The soldiers torture Ta-Chouen in his own chamber (with electrodes to his head and punches to the face), until they find out about a new rendezvous on the beach (rustic Sentosa this time). In a pleasantly realistic detail, Ta-Chouen smuggles comatose Marines out of Singapore in the back of a ‘Cold Storage’ truck belonging to Kun & Company (2 Kuching Road, Singapore 4). Finally Art Smith and a buddy discover the missing Marines’ fate, to be kept on a tanker out to sea in the ship’s deep freezer. The soldiers are literally kept on ice, part of some diabolical experiment of Ta-Chouen’s. After all the action and forward momentum of the film, it’s appropriate that the heroes should spend the last ten minutes stuck in a dark room slowly freezing to death. The meat-headed become meat. Or they would have done if they weren’t rescued. By the preposterous closing, Art Smith and Monika are in loving embrace and all the soldiers are apparently defrosted.
The problem with Cinq gars is not it’s inherently colonial view of Singapore as an exotic playground for male adventure, which could so easily have been simulated in a studio backlot, but rather that at times the Singapore in the film is proved to be so tantalisingly real. It breathes, and the camera is present to capture the moments, the details and the expressions, but then we return to these dead-faced young men and their search for more dead-faced young men. We are shown but kept distant from the life of the city in 1966, a vanished place and a people we want to properly encounter, not just the Smiths and Jones who still arrive every day.
Many thanks to Vinita Ramani for getting me to write this.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
A Good Man In Singapore
World For Ransom, US, directed by Robert Aldrich (1954)
Dan Duryea. If you love film noir, this is a name to cherish. A lithe, sneering presence in some great films of the ‘40s and ‘50s, skin pasty from too many studio interiors, large jaw clenched tight as if swallowing back pain or pride, and his voice, a perpetually nasal, lazy whine. He could be a wise-cracking smartass or a sinister tormentor, both sometimes. Memorably he hounded Edward G Robinson in a diptych of Fritz Langs, Woman In The Window and Scarlet Street, playing the dubious lover/controller of femme fatale Joan Bennett. He could also turn on the charm, most memorably as the dreamily psychotic villain Waco, in Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73.
Duryea was rarely leading man material in film, but he had a lesser known career on super-cheapo TV. And that’s what brought him to ‘Singapore’ if you will. For several years in the mid-to-early ‘50s, he was China Smith, a cynical adventurer, for some reason tossed ashore in Singapore, solving mysteries and outwitting villains in this exotic locale. The film we’re looking at, World For Ransom, is alleged to have been shot off the back of the second series (The New Adventures of China Smith, made in California), recycling sets and cast to a create some bottom-of-the-bill fodder. Aside from the setting, a post-war, heavily militarised Singapore/Malaya, what makes World For Ransom of particular interest is that the director is Robert Aldrich. This was the great macho-man’s last stop before heading towards far more exciting territories, Westerns with A-list star Burt Lancaster (Apache, Vera Cruz), and arguably the last great film noir (the one that imploded the genre), Kiss Me Deadly. Ransom, a quasi-noir-slash-adventure, with its hugely compromised ‘hero’, and the Cold War-era H-bomb MacGuffin is, at a stretch, a rough dress rehearsal.
It opens with one of those ersatz ‘Oriental’ streets cluttered with coolies (later referred to as Foo Chow Road “near the docks”). We meet Duryea’s character, deep in the sprawl, profusely sweating (all the men are drenched in the film, as if the entire overdressed male population of Singapore is steeped in nervous tension), a Yank in a suit, tie and hat, who stumbles along, while a naval foghorn sounds in the distance. Duryea is Mike Callahan, a distant Irish-American relative of ‘China Smith’ we suppose, who quickly finds himself in a hellishly expressionistic stairwell, caught between two sinister Chinese hoods. This is the first of the film’s many stylistic flourishes, and although clearly working with hackneyed, uninspired and excessively talky material, Aldrich is determined (when he can) to make the film a visual feast for those attracted to bizarre angles, smoothly purposeful camera moves, and most of all, looming objects in the foreground. With a promise of “free transportation” Mike agrees to go see Johnny Chan, “the biggest racketeer in Singapore”, who grills him about Julian March, a friend of Mike’s who’s wrapped up in some dodgy business, to which Mike pleads ignorance. “You could be on the level. Half of Singapore thinks you are,” consoles Chan, after slapping his face.
The writers of this highly plotty plot were clearly inspired by (or ripping off) The Third Man. Julian replaces the amoral Harry Lime figure and Marion Carr plays his wife, Frenessy (odd name), who Mike’s foolishly in love with, much as Holly Martins adored Alida Valli in Carol Reed’s masterpiece. There’s also an initially antagonistic military man, Major Bone, who becomes Mike’s buddy, and Mike gets to dive into some sewers (in Singapore, in the 50s?!). Mike’s known Julian since pre-war Shanghai, when they competed for the love of Frenessy. He was called for duty, and so Julian got the girl. Now they’re all washed up in Singapore which has become for each of them, a private hell, Mike gambles and drinks, Frenessy performs an tame male-drag act at a club called The Golden Poppy, while Julian’s busy exploring Singapore as a zone of erotic possibilities. When we first meet him he’s off to “meet a charming young lady called Willow Blossom, or… a young lady not so charming but I hear considerably more talented.”
This cad’s played by the smooth (but sweaty) Patric Knowles, a Yorkshire lad who ran to Hollywood and became a low-rent Errol Flynn (once Will Scarlett to Flynn’s Robin Hood—his biggest gig). Everyone’s worried about Julian, including Frenessy, who tasked Mike with following him, and although he keeps protesting he’s a “big boy”, Julian’s indeed fallen in with a ludicrous bunch of panto villains (like something out of the Batman TV series) led by Gene Lockhart as a chess-playing mastermind Pederas, and amateur heavyweight boxer (and very amateurish actor) Lou Nova as his heavy, Guzik. They conspire to kidnap top Nuclear bomb-maker, Professor O’Connor (Arthur Shields, an Irish John Ford regular) who’s coming through Singapore on his way to Australia (nothing changes!). After an efficiently staged set-piece along ‘Airport Road’, where Julian and gang intercept the car sent for O’Connor, Julian pretends to be a Brit officer at ‘Singapore Airport’ and scoops up the Prof. And he would have got away with it too, if it wasn’t for pesky photographer Wong (a very intense Keye Luke, Charlie Chan’s Number One Son) who snaps Julian in mid-operation. The Governor of Singapore (professional blusterer Nigel Bruce, long serving Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Holmes) declares it a “National Emergency”, and orders a blockade of the “causeway to the mainland”, not the only time in the film that Singapore is described as a mere adjunct to Malaya.
Meanwhile, Dan Duryea has got drunk, beaten up, fallen asleep, and is dragging himself around Singapore in a state of semi-conscious, intense self-loathing. Aldrich makes Mike’s powerful negativity the guiding principle of all Duryea's scenes—spaces are dark, obscure, stuffed with forbidding obstacles. The composition screams “Sucker!” when Frenessy galvanises him into action by promising him he “has a chance” with her. Not only is Mike clearly being set-up by Frenessy, but also by the Brits, who shake him down (“You’ve had a good run in Singapore but you’re coming to the end of your rope.”) so that he’ll escape and lead them to Julian. During the back alley chase sequence, Aldrich has Duryea run through a kaleidoscope of stark frames-within-frames, until he impersonates a topless rickshaw puller, a disguise that makes him literally invisible to the British military. This leads to a cute homo-erotic visit to gangster Chan’s bedroom (“What do want?”, “Most of all, a shirt.”).
The Brits regroup with the Governor and pile on a ton of exposition about Mike, who “gave a good account of himself” in the war, is a “beach comber and soldier of fortune… he knows the China Coast like the back of his hand, he’s wanted everywhere.” They’ve lost him, and “there’s not a sign of him, between here and Penang.” Unctuous Pederas turns up, offering to sell O’Connor to the Brits, explaining that he’s doing the deal in Malaya so he can also offer this “new kind of horror” to the nameless, obviously Commie “enemy”. Mike busts out of Singapore by sewer and jalopy, followed by the avuncular Major Bone, and they head up to Ipoh in record time. Mike knows where Julian, the heavies and the scientist are holed up, ‘The Village of Death’, a deserted kampong, which lives up to its nickname. Aldrich delivers a serious action set-piece as Mike and Bone take on the might of several machine-gun weilding, grim-faced Chinese-American extras. Bone’s shot, and Mike grabs some grenades and turns himself into a walking bomb (see first image), the closest we ever get to a ‘World for Ransom’. After this stand-off, Mike rescues the Prof, but has to kill Julian, who’s more cowardly and corrupt than even Mike suspected.
Back in Singapore, Mike delivers the double-bad news to Frenessy that Julian’s dead and he's the dude what did it. She matches it by telling Mike a/ she doesn’t love him, and b/ she’s a very bad girl indeed, not the saint that Mike imagines —“How do you think I could be so friendly to someone close to the Governor?” Actress Marion Carr emotes her heart out here, successfully auditioning for her role in Kiss Me Deadly.
So, sad old Dan Duryea’s killed his best friend, been betrayed and slapped around by the woman he loves and pretty much everyone else in town. He does what any good man would do in Singapore, takes his hangdog mug back to the bustling throng of Foo Chow Road, and towards the always welcoming neon of The Golden Poppy, much as Jack Flowers will disappear into Clarke Quay a couple of decades later. Tigers all round?
Dan Duryea. If you love film noir, this is a name to cherish. A lithe, sneering presence in some great films of the ‘40s and ‘50s, skin pasty from too many studio interiors, large jaw clenched tight as if swallowing back pain or pride, and his voice, a perpetually nasal, lazy whine. He could be a wise-cracking smartass or a sinister tormentor, both sometimes. Memorably he hounded Edward G Robinson in a diptych of Fritz Langs, Woman In The Window and Scarlet Street, playing the dubious lover/controller of femme fatale Joan Bennett. He could also turn on the charm, most memorably as the dreamily psychotic villain Waco, in Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73.
Duryea was rarely leading man material in film, but he had a lesser known career on super-cheapo TV. And that’s what brought him to ‘Singapore’ if you will. For several years in the mid-to-early ‘50s, he was China Smith, a cynical adventurer, for some reason tossed ashore in Singapore, solving mysteries and outwitting villains in this exotic locale. The film we’re looking at, World For Ransom, is alleged to have been shot off the back of the second series (The New Adventures of China Smith, made in California), recycling sets and cast to a create some bottom-of-the-bill fodder. Aside from the setting, a post-war, heavily militarised Singapore/Malaya, what makes World For Ransom of particular interest is that the director is Robert Aldrich. This was the great macho-man’s last stop before heading towards far more exciting territories, Westerns with A-list star Burt Lancaster (Apache, Vera Cruz), and arguably the last great film noir (the one that imploded the genre), Kiss Me Deadly. Ransom, a quasi-noir-slash-adventure, with its hugely compromised ‘hero’, and the Cold War-era H-bomb MacGuffin is, at a stretch, a rough dress rehearsal.
It opens with one of those ersatz ‘Oriental’ streets cluttered with coolies (later referred to as Foo Chow Road “near the docks”). We meet Duryea’s character, deep in the sprawl, profusely sweating (all the men are drenched in the film, as if the entire overdressed male population of Singapore is steeped in nervous tension), a Yank in a suit, tie and hat, who stumbles along, while a naval foghorn sounds in the distance. Duryea is Mike Callahan, a distant Irish-American relative of ‘China Smith’ we suppose, who quickly finds himself in a hellishly expressionistic stairwell, caught between two sinister Chinese hoods. This is the first of the film’s many stylistic flourishes, and although clearly working with hackneyed, uninspired and excessively talky material, Aldrich is determined (when he can) to make the film a visual feast for those attracted to bizarre angles, smoothly purposeful camera moves, and most of all, looming objects in the foreground. With a promise of “free transportation” Mike agrees to go see Johnny Chan, “the biggest racketeer in Singapore”, who grills him about Julian March, a friend of Mike’s who’s wrapped up in some dodgy business, to which Mike pleads ignorance. “You could be on the level. Half of Singapore thinks you are,” consoles Chan, after slapping his face.
The writers of this highly plotty plot were clearly inspired by (or ripping off) The Third Man. Julian replaces the amoral Harry Lime figure and Marion Carr plays his wife, Frenessy (odd name), who Mike’s foolishly in love with, much as Holly Martins adored Alida Valli in Carol Reed’s masterpiece. There’s also an initially antagonistic military man, Major Bone, who becomes Mike’s buddy, and Mike gets to dive into some sewers (in Singapore, in the 50s?!). Mike’s known Julian since pre-war Shanghai, when they competed for the love of Frenessy. He was called for duty, and so Julian got the girl. Now they’re all washed up in Singapore which has become for each of them, a private hell, Mike gambles and drinks, Frenessy performs an tame male-drag act at a club called The Golden Poppy, while Julian’s busy exploring Singapore as a zone of erotic possibilities. When we first meet him he’s off to “meet a charming young lady called Willow Blossom, or… a young lady not so charming but I hear considerably more talented.”
This cad’s played by the smooth (but sweaty) Patric Knowles, a Yorkshire lad who ran to Hollywood and became a low-rent Errol Flynn (once Will Scarlett to Flynn’s Robin Hood—his biggest gig). Everyone’s worried about Julian, including Frenessy, who tasked Mike with following him, and although he keeps protesting he’s a “big boy”, Julian’s indeed fallen in with a ludicrous bunch of panto villains (like something out of the Batman TV series) led by Gene Lockhart as a chess-playing mastermind Pederas, and amateur heavyweight boxer (and very amateurish actor) Lou Nova as his heavy, Guzik. They conspire to kidnap top Nuclear bomb-maker, Professor O’Connor (Arthur Shields, an Irish John Ford regular) who’s coming through Singapore on his way to Australia (nothing changes!). After an efficiently staged set-piece along ‘Airport Road’, where Julian and gang intercept the car sent for O’Connor, Julian pretends to be a Brit officer at ‘Singapore Airport’ and scoops up the Prof. And he would have got away with it too, if it wasn’t for pesky photographer Wong (a very intense Keye Luke, Charlie Chan’s Number One Son) who snaps Julian in mid-operation. The Governor of Singapore (professional blusterer Nigel Bruce, long serving Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Holmes) declares it a “National Emergency”, and orders a blockade of the “causeway to the mainland”, not the only time in the film that Singapore is described as a mere adjunct to Malaya.
Meanwhile, Dan Duryea has got drunk, beaten up, fallen asleep, and is dragging himself around Singapore in a state of semi-conscious, intense self-loathing. Aldrich makes Mike’s powerful negativity the guiding principle of all Duryea's scenes—spaces are dark, obscure, stuffed with forbidding obstacles. The composition screams “Sucker!” when Frenessy galvanises him into action by promising him he “has a chance” with her. Not only is Mike clearly being set-up by Frenessy, but also by the Brits, who shake him down (“You’ve had a good run in Singapore but you’re coming to the end of your rope.”) so that he’ll escape and lead them to Julian. During the back alley chase sequence, Aldrich has Duryea run through a kaleidoscope of stark frames-within-frames, until he impersonates a topless rickshaw puller, a disguise that makes him literally invisible to the British military. This leads to a cute homo-erotic visit to gangster Chan’s bedroom (“What do want?”, “Most of all, a shirt.”).
The Brits regroup with the Governor and pile on a ton of exposition about Mike, who “gave a good account of himself” in the war, is a “beach comber and soldier of fortune… he knows the China Coast like the back of his hand, he’s wanted everywhere.” They’ve lost him, and “there’s not a sign of him, between here and Penang.” Unctuous Pederas turns up, offering to sell O’Connor to the Brits, explaining that he’s doing the deal in Malaya so he can also offer this “new kind of horror” to the nameless, obviously Commie “enemy”. Mike busts out of Singapore by sewer and jalopy, followed by the avuncular Major Bone, and they head up to Ipoh in record time. Mike knows where Julian, the heavies and the scientist are holed up, ‘The Village of Death’, a deserted kampong, which lives up to its nickname. Aldrich delivers a serious action set-piece as Mike and Bone take on the might of several machine-gun weilding, grim-faced Chinese-American extras. Bone’s shot, and Mike grabs some grenades and turns himself into a walking bomb (see first image), the closest we ever get to a ‘World for Ransom’. After this stand-off, Mike rescues the Prof, but has to kill Julian, who’s more cowardly and corrupt than even Mike suspected.
Back in Singapore, Mike delivers the double-bad news to Frenessy that Julian’s dead and he's the dude what did it. She matches it by telling Mike a/ she doesn’t love him, and b/ she’s a very bad girl indeed, not the saint that Mike imagines —“How do you think I could be so friendly to someone close to the Governor?” Actress Marion Carr emotes her heart out here, successfully auditioning for her role in Kiss Me Deadly.
So, sad old Dan Duryea’s killed his best friend, been betrayed and slapped around by the woman he loves and pretty much everyone else in town. He does what any good man would do in Singapore, takes his hangdog mug back to the bustling throng of Foo Chow Road, and towards the always welcoming neon of The Golden Poppy, much as Jack Flowers will disappear into Clarke Quay a couple of decades later. Tigers all round?
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
The Up Escalator Forever: Bowie in Singapore
Ricochet, UK, directed by Gerry Troyna (1984)
A thin white man wanders around a near-deserted shopping mall. It’s night. His drift is purposeless, but he keeps moving. What secret rendezvous is he heading towards? Is he being followed or is he following? Eerie sounds in the background. Muzak from another planet. That’s the clue. Perhaps the walker isn’t human. A misplaced alien sleepwalking through an decentred landscape. He’s come down to earth to look for the past, but instead he’s found the future. Strip-lit walkways and glittering atria; a musical fountain; a deranged architect’s plan for some deluded utopia. But no one’s here. Structures long since abandoned by their original users, now patrolled only by guards and the occasional foreign interloper.
The alien goes where the escalator delivers him. He sits. Lost. Scared.
What is this place?
David Bowie in Singapore is irresistible. But Ricochet, a hybrid documentary-fiction-diary film conceived and concocted by Bowie with director Gerry Troyna in 1983 doesn’t just take place in Singapore. Bowie, coming to the end of his epically long ‘Serious Moonlight’ tour decided that after shows in Australia and New Zealand he would head up to South-East Asia (originally Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Hong Kong, but KL fell through). These countries were not yet on the stadium tour circuit, and so it was a rare and particularly difficult thing to pull off. Ever the innovator, Bowie must have sensed an opportunity to discover something new, and he wanted a camera crew along to capture the experience.
Named after an apocalyptic track off the enormously successful Let’s Dance album, Ricochet, is an atmospheric if fragmented account of Bowie’s visits to the three major Asian cities. Even at the time it must have made for a rather quirky ‘rockumentary’, and now, virtually unseen for decades, it’s become a historical artefact, an eccentric record of ten days of working tourism in Asia in late 1983.
The project began when Bowie contacted Troyna, a young film-maker whose ground-breaking 1980 documentary Deccan, about travelling through India by train, had impressed the star. Troyna recalls meeting Bowie in the Savoy in London, and later being flown out to Tokyo (where Bowie was touring) to discuss the film. They got on well, and Bowie commissioned him to make the official document of what was openly referred to as “The Bungle in the Jungle.” This wouldn’t be a conventional tour-film, Troyna hired screenwriter, Martin Stellman, to draft a rough script, and began the complicated process of setting up production units with fixers, crew and researchers in each city before Bowie touched down.
In Cracked Actor, an infamous BBC documentary about the rock star made in 1974, Bowie had appeared deeply uncomfortable, strung-out and gawkily articulate. Nine years on, Ricochet shows us the remade and remodelled Bowie. Supremely charismatic and suave, he’s a global traveller equally at ease drifting through the airports, hotel lobbies, streets and finally the cavernous stadiums of Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok. He could be a diplomat, a businessman, politician or movie star - the only giveaway is his dyed straw-yellow hair.
The film divides geographically into three acts, Hong Kong, Singapore and then Bangkok (this reshuffles the real order of travel, Bowie flew into Singapore from New Zealand first, then to Bangkok and finished with two shows in Hong Kong). Each segment roughly follows the same formula, follow Bowie as he experiences each city. Then, let fiction creep into the fact of Bowie’s presence. There's different results each time.
Bowie arrives in Hong Kong to be hustled through a throng of fans and press, with paltry security – a few devotees touch his hair. “That was quite a reception,” he deadpans in the limo later to Corinne ‘Coco’ Shwab, his long-serving personal assistant (also in Cracked Actor). Then breaks into a throaty rendition of the classic Chinese song, May Kway (Mei Kwei?) – which he associates with Hong Kong (it’s from Shanghai). There’s a press conference where he talks up the Asian (Japanese) influence on his music and style. We shift to a sub-plot, three slightly fey members of a Bowie covers band (a decent stab at Ziggy) plan to attend their idol's gig, but the drummer can’t afford a ticket, and wanders Kowloon (there's an incredible travelling shot of the washing hung outside a vast tenement) trying to rustle the cash. Meanwhile, Bowie kills time in a hotel suite quipping with a tour promoter about ticket prices (very expensive), watches TV (ancient kung fu flicks, crazy adverts and a colonial Rule Britannia), and dines on a boat with local socialites (with whom he is utterly charming), sitting near the first of a series of ‘mysterious Americans’ who will quietly plague him throughout this leg of the tour (more on them later). Our young Hong Konger friend sells some records to a grumpy music store boss, and voila, he has entry to the concert. Not that difficult. Cut to Bowie on stage, kicking into the inevitable China Girl, complete with mimed self-kissing, and then a high energy rock-out Look Back in Anger.
Now we get to the section that concerns this blog. As the music from HK fades away, Bowie sits in the plane delivering him to the next destination. First we’re in a tranquil Hindu temple, which I’d guess is the Sri Mariamman Temple on South Bridge Road. Bowie, now clad in white suit and fedora strolls around a depopulated, sleepy Chinatown, accompanied by the relentless beat of construction. Passing the street where Jack Flowers has his day-job in Saint Jack, and wanders into Thian Hock Keng Temple on Telok Ayer Street contemplating an enormous Buddha and getting his fortune told (we never find out what it is). In a taxi, Bowie has a discussion about freedom and control with a chatty and very open Indian cab driver, concluding with an astonished Bowie asking how people are executed for drugs offenses: “They hang them.” Cue martial music (played by a school band), over a very pointed montage which includes a campaign banner ‘Come on Singapore, work together better’, a man hanging a framed photo of Lee Kuan Yew outside his shophouse, an old building being demolished and a row of blank HDB ‘slabs’ (as Rem Koolhaas would put it). It already all feels very different from Hong Kong, and there’s a reason for this.
Bowie had arrived in Singapore a few days before the gig and found there was a strong possibility that the concert would be cancelled. “The Singapore authorities are not friendly toward rock & roll,” he writes in the diary-like introduction to the Serious Moonlight tour book. China Girl and Modern Love were banned on the radio, and a rumour of an “impromptu guest appearance” at a youth club had, according to Bowie, led police to threaten his local promoter with imprisonment.
This was Goh Poh Seng; doctor, poet, playwright, novelist, night-club and live music impresario. Goh (who died in January this year) was a fervent champion of the arts in all incarnations, including pop music. A year before he’d received the Cultural Medallion, the biggest gong that the Singapore state bestows on artists, but that didn’t stop him facing resistance all the way with the Bowie show, which was taking place in Singapore's largest venue, the now-closed National Stadium. Goh had taken it on at the last minute and it was (at that time) the biggest concert that anyone had ever organised in Singapore. “You need at least three months to prepare for a concert like this, if you’re sane,” Goh told The Straits Times when it was announced, “we’re doing it in one month.” Bowie describes him as “wonderful and fearless.”
Troyna recalls that until the gig happened they all “thought we were going to get thrown out.” This situation isn’t referred to in Ricochet, but a high level of tension and discontent creeps into the Singapore segment. Troyna says that the script outlined the “points we wanted to make about each country", Singapore was intended to reflect “alienation and submission to the state”, but of course there would be a great deal of improvisation. The director walked around Orchard Road and discovered Far East Plaza, Singapore’s newest and (at that time) largest, shopping mall, opened only a few months earlier. It was a suitably “alienating” place. Bowie agreed. So, in the film, while a phone rings in his empty Ming Court ‘Emperor’ Suite, its occupant walks through the night in a black trenchcoat. Heads down Scotts Road and up an escalator to an overhead bridge drenched in blue neon, his yellow hair the only sign of life. The eerie-sinister soundtrack is Sense of Doubt, a Bowie/Eno collaboration (from the Heroes album) which had, two years before, scored a walk through junkie infested Berlin in Uli Edel’s notorious Christiane F. Ironically, here it’s used to lend atmosphere to the sterile sci-fi weirdness of "The Biggest Tourist Shopping Centre in South-East Asia". After his escalator odyssey and a surreal scolding from a diminutive security guard, Bowie sits, looking pensively unimpressed, beneath the glittery kitsch of the musical fountain and a row of fake, plastic Christmas trees. In the Serious Moonlight book, Bowie recalls the moment he faces the Singapore crowd, “I am supposed to say something to the children in the Singapore audience. These children who are doomed to ride the up escalator forever.”
“Can we go somewhere where there are no skyscrapers?” Bowie asks a cab-driver the next morning. Depressingly he gets dumped at Raffles Hotel, passing a mustachioed American, who gets a mysterious sound effect and a freeze frame. Troyna says this little leitmotif (it occurs in Hong Kong and Bangkok too) was inspired by the fact that it was clear to everyone that Bowie was “being closely watched” wherever he went. Perhaps the CIA; nobody ever found out, but Bowie in Asia was bringing out the spooks.
Then he’s amidst ghosts of a different kind. Inside the faux-colonial splendour of Raffles Hotel, Bowie seems as equally apprehensive as he did back in the mall. He’s swapped cold futurism for tropical nostalgia and found both equally wanting. Suddenly we’re back to Chinatown, and Bowie fancies entering a building where a Chinese Opera troupe is rehearsing. Two young women, Theresa and Tsiu-Lien stop to talk on their way to the rehearsal, neither of them seem to be aware of who Bowie is, and insist on asking “my boss” before they’ll let him in. Theresa delivers the bad news. The boss says no, “Sorry ah… how?” Disappointed but unfazed, Bowie promises to try and attend their show that night (after his own). Troyna says that the rejection was completely spontaneous, and it was blamed on either superstition or that “they were worried that they’d get in trouble.”
Although there’d been a conscious effort not to show typical ‘back-stage’ material in the film, the opportunity to contrast the different levels of ‘performance’, the Chinese Opera and the Rock Concert, was irresistible. So we have footage of the lighting rig being mounted in the National Stadium (Bowie writes: “The lights were flown in from all over Malaysia. Many arrived broken, and those intact not much more powerful than a bedroom lamp.”) and Bowie departing from the hotel, while Theresa leaves her cluttered Chinatown shop-house. Out in the stadium a crowd is gathering, watched closely by uniformed police. Backstage Bowie’s interviewed by a fairly hapless young DJ, William Xavier (now better known as easy-listening maven, Mr X) while the rest of the band sit, giggle and mock in the background, not without encouragement from their leader. Bowie turns it around and starts to question the DJ, “What is rebellious here? What does rebel mean?” asks the man who sang Rebel, Rebel, and we see Xavier, well aware of the 16mm camera inches from his face, struggle between trying to act cool and knowledgeable in front of Bowie and giving an extremely guarded, cautious answer (Rebellion in Singapore he explains, has been “kept within reasonable limits”).
Meanwhile, the Chinese Opera has bestowed its own glamour on Theresa and Tsiu-Lien, and they hit the stage in full make-up and regalia, as Bowie, over in Kallang, speaks the first lines of Heroes, “An apposite choice,” says Troyna, and we’re into the gig.
In his newspaper review the next day, Philip Cheah, then reporter for long defunct paper, The Singapore Monitor, called it “the only real rock concert in years.” He pointed out that the stadium was less than half full, “but at least we were heroes, just for one night.” In the tour book, Bowie himself describes the heat, the discomfort and terrible sound; looking out at the blank, other faces, the twitchy armed cops and “for a moment I feel I am playing to the tiger-infested jungle that existed here until the arrival of concrete a few short decades ago.” Then he suddenly connects with the audience and “for one night it can mean everything.”
Bowie performing Heroes is intercut with scenes from the Chinese wayang, so much so that the song eventually seems be placed into the mouths of the singers. Before he turns his back on the audience in the stadium Bowie grins, almost laughing, suddenly, finally happy. Then for a moment, Bowie’s in the audience at the opera, surrounded by aunties and uncles, looking extraordinarily handsome, and Heroes has become their song, Singapore’s song. Its final chords played out over a beautiful close-up of an opera performer (is this Theresa?). An equilibrium is found between music and image. A symbolic moment for a weary showman; performer gives way to other performers and becomes the audience, a final reversal. It’s ambiguous, but it’s also hopeful. And that’s how David Bowie and Ricochet leave Singapore.
Bangkok with its mixture of sacred (temples) and profane (go-go bars) has an utterly different feel to Singapore, it flows... and it concludes with Bowie apparently living in solitude on the river. He seems happier in Bangkok, even his wardrobe is more relaxed (Chinos and a short-sleeved shirt). He’s a civilian here, almost another wide-eyed farang tourist, cruising the clubs and the river. In Hong Kong he was the jet-setting rock star-idol glimpsing the sprawl from the back of the limo. In Singapore he was a stranger in a strange land, a drifter fuelled by discomfort and tension. Singapore makes him the alien. So, of all the cities in December 1983, the Lion city-state is the one that’s the most ‘Bowie-esque’.
Back in the UK, Troyna assembled a cut of the film to show Bowie. They’d always intended for him to provide a voice over, making the whole film a kind of travelogue-diary of the star’s thoughts and impressions. But that never happened. Bowie watched it, liked what he saw. Troyna delivered his version (just short of 80 minutes), without a voice over, and that was the end of it. Bowie sold it to Virgin, and a 60 minute VHS version was released exclusively to their shops, and the full-length Ricochet remained unseen until 2006 when it was included as an extra on the Serious Moonlight DVD.
And in 2004, Bowie returned to Singapore.
Thanks to Philip Cheah, Regina De Rozario and Gerry Troyna for sharing their invaluable information.
A thin white man wanders around a near-deserted shopping mall. It’s night. His drift is purposeless, but he keeps moving. What secret rendezvous is he heading towards? Is he being followed or is he following? Eerie sounds in the background. Muzak from another planet. That’s the clue. Perhaps the walker isn’t human. A misplaced alien sleepwalking through an decentred landscape. He’s come down to earth to look for the past, but instead he’s found the future. Strip-lit walkways and glittering atria; a musical fountain; a deranged architect’s plan for some deluded utopia. But no one’s here. Structures long since abandoned by their original users, now patrolled only by guards and the occasional foreign interloper.
The alien goes where the escalator delivers him. He sits. Lost. Scared.
What is this place?
David Bowie in Singapore is irresistible. But Ricochet, a hybrid documentary-fiction-diary film conceived and concocted by Bowie with director Gerry Troyna in 1983 doesn’t just take place in Singapore. Bowie, coming to the end of his epically long ‘Serious Moonlight’ tour decided that after shows in Australia and New Zealand he would head up to South-East Asia (originally Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Hong Kong, but KL fell through). These countries were not yet on the stadium tour circuit, and so it was a rare and particularly difficult thing to pull off. Ever the innovator, Bowie must have sensed an opportunity to discover something new, and he wanted a camera crew along to capture the experience.
Named after an apocalyptic track off the enormously successful Let’s Dance album, Ricochet, is an atmospheric if fragmented account of Bowie’s visits to the three major Asian cities. Even at the time it must have made for a rather quirky ‘rockumentary’, and now, virtually unseen for decades, it’s become a historical artefact, an eccentric record of ten days of working tourism in Asia in late 1983.
The project began when Bowie contacted Troyna, a young film-maker whose ground-breaking 1980 documentary Deccan, about travelling through India by train, had impressed the star. Troyna recalls meeting Bowie in the Savoy in London, and later being flown out to Tokyo (where Bowie was touring) to discuss the film. They got on well, and Bowie commissioned him to make the official document of what was openly referred to as “The Bungle in the Jungle.” This wouldn’t be a conventional tour-film, Troyna hired screenwriter, Martin Stellman, to draft a rough script, and began the complicated process of setting up production units with fixers, crew and researchers in each city before Bowie touched down.
In Cracked Actor, an infamous BBC documentary about the rock star made in 1974, Bowie had appeared deeply uncomfortable, strung-out and gawkily articulate. Nine years on, Ricochet shows us the remade and remodelled Bowie. Supremely charismatic and suave, he’s a global traveller equally at ease drifting through the airports, hotel lobbies, streets and finally the cavernous stadiums of Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok. He could be a diplomat, a businessman, politician or movie star - the only giveaway is his dyed straw-yellow hair.
The film divides geographically into three acts, Hong Kong, Singapore and then Bangkok (this reshuffles the real order of travel, Bowie flew into Singapore from New Zealand first, then to Bangkok and finished with two shows in Hong Kong). Each segment roughly follows the same formula, follow Bowie as he experiences each city. Then, let fiction creep into the fact of Bowie’s presence. There's different results each time.
Bowie arrives in Hong Kong to be hustled through a throng of fans and press, with paltry security – a few devotees touch his hair. “That was quite a reception,” he deadpans in the limo later to Corinne ‘Coco’ Shwab, his long-serving personal assistant (also in Cracked Actor). Then breaks into a throaty rendition of the classic Chinese song, May Kway (Mei Kwei?) – which he associates with Hong Kong (it’s from Shanghai). There’s a press conference where he talks up the Asian (Japanese) influence on his music and style. We shift to a sub-plot, three slightly fey members of a Bowie covers band (a decent stab at Ziggy) plan to attend their idol's gig, but the drummer can’t afford a ticket, and wanders Kowloon (there's an incredible travelling shot of the washing hung outside a vast tenement) trying to rustle the cash. Meanwhile, Bowie kills time in a hotel suite quipping with a tour promoter about ticket prices (very expensive), watches TV (ancient kung fu flicks, crazy adverts and a colonial Rule Britannia), and dines on a boat with local socialites (with whom he is utterly charming), sitting near the first of a series of ‘mysterious Americans’ who will quietly plague him throughout this leg of the tour (more on them later). Our young Hong Konger friend sells some records to a grumpy music store boss, and voila, he has entry to the concert. Not that difficult. Cut to Bowie on stage, kicking into the inevitable China Girl, complete with mimed self-kissing, and then a high energy rock-out Look Back in Anger.
Now we get to the section that concerns this blog. As the music from HK fades away, Bowie sits in the plane delivering him to the next destination. First we’re in a tranquil Hindu temple, which I’d guess is the Sri Mariamman Temple on South Bridge Road. Bowie, now clad in white suit and fedora strolls around a depopulated, sleepy Chinatown, accompanied by the relentless beat of construction. Passing the street where Jack Flowers has his day-job in Saint Jack, and wanders into Thian Hock Keng Temple on Telok Ayer Street contemplating an enormous Buddha and getting his fortune told (we never find out what it is). In a taxi, Bowie has a discussion about freedom and control with a chatty and very open Indian cab driver, concluding with an astonished Bowie asking how people are executed for drugs offenses: “They hang them.” Cue martial music (played by a school band), over a very pointed montage which includes a campaign banner ‘Come on Singapore, work together better’, a man hanging a framed photo of Lee Kuan Yew outside his shophouse, an old building being demolished and a row of blank HDB ‘slabs’ (as Rem Koolhaas would put it). It already all feels very different from Hong Kong, and there’s a reason for this.
Bowie had arrived in Singapore a few days before the gig and found there was a strong possibility that the concert would be cancelled. “The Singapore authorities are not friendly toward rock & roll,” he writes in the diary-like introduction to the Serious Moonlight tour book. China Girl and Modern Love were banned on the radio, and a rumour of an “impromptu guest appearance” at a youth club had, according to Bowie, led police to threaten his local promoter with imprisonment.
This was Goh Poh Seng; doctor, poet, playwright, novelist, night-club and live music impresario. Goh (who died in January this year) was a fervent champion of the arts in all incarnations, including pop music. A year before he’d received the Cultural Medallion, the biggest gong that the Singapore state bestows on artists, but that didn’t stop him facing resistance all the way with the Bowie show, which was taking place in Singapore's largest venue, the now-closed National Stadium. Goh had taken it on at the last minute and it was (at that time) the biggest concert that anyone had ever organised in Singapore. “You need at least three months to prepare for a concert like this, if you’re sane,” Goh told The Straits Times when it was announced, “we’re doing it in one month.” Bowie describes him as “wonderful and fearless.”
Troyna recalls that until the gig happened they all “thought we were going to get thrown out.” This situation isn’t referred to in Ricochet, but a high level of tension and discontent creeps into the Singapore segment. Troyna says that the script outlined the “points we wanted to make about each country", Singapore was intended to reflect “alienation and submission to the state”, but of course there would be a great deal of improvisation. The director walked around Orchard Road and discovered Far East Plaza, Singapore’s newest and (at that time) largest, shopping mall, opened only a few months earlier. It was a suitably “alienating” place. Bowie agreed. So, in the film, while a phone rings in his empty Ming Court ‘Emperor’ Suite, its occupant walks through the night in a black trenchcoat. Heads down Scotts Road and up an escalator to an overhead bridge drenched in blue neon, his yellow hair the only sign of life. The eerie-sinister soundtrack is Sense of Doubt, a Bowie/Eno collaboration (from the Heroes album) which had, two years before, scored a walk through junkie infested Berlin in Uli Edel’s notorious Christiane F. Ironically, here it’s used to lend atmosphere to the sterile sci-fi weirdness of "The Biggest Tourist Shopping Centre in South-East Asia". After his escalator odyssey and a surreal scolding from a diminutive security guard, Bowie sits, looking pensively unimpressed, beneath the glittery kitsch of the musical fountain and a row of fake, plastic Christmas trees. In the Serious Moonlight book, Bowie recalls the moment he faces the Singapore crowd, “I am supposed to say something to the children in the Singapore audience. These children who are doomed to ride the up escalator forever.”
“Can we go somewhere where there are no skyscrapers?” Bowie asks a cab-driver the next morning. Depressingly he gets dumped at Raffles Hotel, passing a mustachioed American, who gets a mysterious sound effect and a freeze frame. Troyna says this little leitmotif (it occurs in Hong Kong and Bangkok too) was inspired by the fact that it was clear to everyone that Bowie was “being closely watched” wherever he went. Perhaps the CIA; nobody ever found out, but Bowie in Asia was bringing out the spooks.
Then he’s amidst ghosts of a different kind. Inside the faux-colonial splendour of Raffles Hotel, Bowie seems as equally apprehensive as he did back in the mall. He’s swapped cold futurism for tropical nostalgia and found both equally wanting. Suddenly we’re back to Chinatown, and Bowie fancies entering a building where a Chinese Opera troupe is rehearsing. Two young women, Theresa and Tsiu-Lien stop to talk on their way to the rehearsal, neither of them seem to be aware of who Bowie is, and insist on asking “my boss” before they’ll let him in. Theresa delivers the bad news. The boss says no, “Sorry ah… how?” Disappointed but unfazed, Bowie promises to try and attend their show that night (after his own). Troyna says that the rejection was completely spontaneous, and it was blamed on either superstition or that “they were worried that they’d get in trouble.”
Although there’d been a conscious effort not to show typical ‘back-stage’ material in the film, the opportunity to contrast the different levels of ‘performance’, the Chinese Opera and the Rock Concert, was irresistible. So we have footage of the lighting rig being mounted in the National Stadium (Bowie writes: “The lights were flown in from all over Malaysia. Many arrived broken, and those intact not much more powerful than a bedroom lamp.”) and Bowie departing from the hotel, while Theresa leaves her cluttered Chinatown shop-house. Out in the stadium a crowd is gathering, watched closely by uniformed police. Backstage Bowie’s interviewed by a fairly hapless young DJ, William Xavier (now better known as easy-listening maven, Mr X) while the rest of the band sit, giggle and mock in the background, not without encouragement from their leader. Bowie turns it around and starts to question the DJ, “What is rebellious here? What does rebel mean?” asks the man who sang Rebel, Rebel, and we see Xavier, well aware of the 16mm camera inches from his face, struggle between trying to act cool and knowledgeable in front of Bowie and giving an extremely guarded, cautious answer (Rebellion in Singapore he explains, has been “kept within reasonable limits”).
Meanwhile, the Chinese Opera has bestowed its own glamour on Theresa and Tsiu-Lien, and they hit the stage in full make-up and regalia, as Bowie, over in Kallang, speaks the first lines of Heroes, “An apposite choice,” says Troyna, and we’re into the gig.
In his newspaper review the next day, Philip Cheah, then reporter for long defunct paper, The Singapore Monitor, called it “the only real rock concert in years.” He pointed out that the stadium was less than half full, “but at least we were heroes, just for one night.” In the tour book, Bowie himself describes the heat, the discomfort and terrible sound; looking out at the blank, other faces, the twitchy armed cops and “for a moment I feel I am playing to the tiger-infested jungle that existed here until the arrival of concrete a few short decades ago.” Then he suddenly connects with the audience and “for one night it can mean everything.”
Bowie performing Heroes is intercut with scenes from the Chinese wayang, so much so that the song eventually seems be placed into the mouths of the singers. Before he turns his back on the audience in the stadium Bowie grins, almost laughing, suddenly, finally happy. Then for a moment, Bowie’s in the audience at the opera, surrounded by aunties and uncles, looking extraordinarily handsome, and Heroes has become their song, Singapore’s song. Its final chords played out over a beautiful close-up of an opera performer (is this Theresa?). An equilibrium is found between music and image. A symbolic moment for a weary showman; performer gives way to other performers and becomes the audience, a final reversal. It’s ambiguous, but it’s also hopeful. And that’s how David Bowie and Ricochet leave Singapore.
Bangkok with its mixture of sacred (temples) and profane (go-go bars) has an utterly different feel to Singapore, it flows... and it concludes with Bowie apparently living in solitude on the river. He seems happier in Bangkok, even his wardrobe is more relaxed (Chinos and a short-sleeved shirt). He’s a civilian here, almost another wide-eyed farang tourist, cruising the clubs and the river. In Hong Kong he was the jet-setting rock star-idol glimpsing the sprawl from the back of the limo. In Singapore he was a stranger in a strange land, a drifter fuelled by discomfort and tension. Singapore makes him the alien. So, of all the cities in December 1983, the Lion city-state is the one that’s the most ‘Bowie-esque’.
Back in the UK, Troyna assembled a cut of the film to show Bowie. They’d always intended for him to provide a voice over, making the whole film a kind of travelogue-diary of the star’s thoughts and impressions. But that never happened. Bowie watched it, liked what he saw. Troyna delivered his version (just short of 80 minutes), without a voice over, and that was the end of it. Bowie sold it to Virgin, and a 60 minute VHS version was released exclusively to their shops, and the full-length Ricochet remained unseen until 2006 when it was included as an extra on the Serious Moonlight DVD.
And in 2004, Bowie returned to Singapore.
Thanks to Philip Cheah, Regina De Rozario and Gerry Troyna for sharing their invaluable information.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
National Day Special: Opposition Parties
A Very Dangerous Game – Series 3/Episode 2 of Danger Man (1965)
(Singapore circa 1965... or is it?)
Patrick McGoohan in Singapore? Sadly, not this time; the exotic Orient encountered by super-spy John Drake in this 1965 episode of Danger Man (AKA Secret Agent in the US) is a stereotypical colonial fantasy conjured up on a soundstage in Shepperton studios with sundry pieces of ‘stock’ footage. No one involved left London. This was the typical strategy for constructing a fictional ‘Singapore’ in the pre-War era. Hollywood had done it many times before, including John Brahm’s Far East noir-adventure, Singapore in 1947. But from the start of the 60s, lighter cameras and cheaper air tickets popularised location shooting, even for b-movies, and by ‘65 there’d been several Sandokan films (based on Emilio Salgari’s Italian tales of heroic Malay piracy) and a few ‘Eurospy’ flicks making limited use of real Singapore and Malaysian locations. This episode of Danger Man, however, was for the telly, and then, as now, budgets and schedules were tight, and why hop on a plane for fifteen hours when you can make any locale in the world down in Studio B?
(McGoohan: Calculating coldness with an undertow of bizarre eccentricity)
Danger Man began in 1960 as a vehicle for the peculiar charisma of McGoohan, an American raised in Ireland and England, groomed for TV stardom by media mogul Lew Grade. The original series pre-dated the first James Bond film; and in retrospect we can see that the weekly hijinks of super-agent John Drake anticipate the entire Eurospy genre, and as the series got more, shall we say, baroque, it paved the way for the stylised antics of The Avengers (and dozens of imitators) as well as McGoohan’s pet project, The Prisoner. By 1965, Bond was big and McGoohan (who had an unusually authorial influence on his own series, even then) was supposedly intent on making John Drake a more downbeat, realistic counterpart to Ian Fleming’s creation. That’s not born out by this episode, which is lightly comic, and, in terms of plot, completely ludicrous; but it’s not without interest in depicting Singapore in the year of independence.
The set-up introduces Simpson, an embittered toff essayed by the wonderfully seedy Anthony Dawson, ranting to a blonde companion about “going out to Singapore to lecture for the British Cultural Mission…can’t get a decent job here in England”. There are many connections between James Bond and Danger Man, but casting Dawson is the most self-conscious—he’d had a part in Dr No and then became the body-double for 007’s pussy-stroking nemesis Blofeld in two sequels. Back in Danger Man, Simpson needs to prove he’s not just any old foreign talent, “You know I’ve got a very big job waiting for me in Singapore,” he assures us, repeating for good measure, “A very big job.” This sounds ominous! Pretty soon, Simpson is in the hands of the authorities, and in an inventive touch the Danger Man titles (with the great demented harpsichord theme tune) play over a silent sequence of John Drake chain-smoking his way through the interrogation (torture?) of Simpson. Ending in a crash-zoom on Anthony Dawson’s beleaguered face. The episode’s directed by Don Chaffey, a reliable pair of hands (who went on to direct Jason and the Argonauts), but aside from this flourish, his work here’s strictly pedestrian.
Anyway, the game’s afoot, Drake will fly to Singapore pretending to be Simpson to infiltrate “the opposition”, a phrase used many times as a euphemism for Communist spies (I don’t think the word Communist is ever used), the writer of this, David Stone, who’d written dialogue for Polanski’s Repulsion, could never have known the special resonance of the term “opposition” in Singapore then (or now), but he should’ve been aware that this was five years after the supposed defeat of Communist guerrilla warriors in the Malayan ‘Emergency’. Reds in the tropics of Southeast Asia were no joke—although as we shall see, this episode is determined to treat them like one.
Before his trip to Singapore, Drake gets a forged visa from Charles Carson, who’d played a spy in Hitchcock’s Secret Agent thirty years earlier, and warns Drake that the Chinese have been playing the “dangerous game” of spying for “three thousand years”. Then he gets gadgets from young Christopher Sandford, better known today as the biographer of Jagger, Cobain and Polanski. The casting in these shows is fascinating!
(Not the Raffles Hotel? Could be in London with a couple of rickshaws)
Stock footage time! A jet plane with the BOAC logo gives way to an impressive overhead cityscape of Singapore—complete with location title. Except it isn’t Singapore, it’s Hong Kong island. Then a glimpse of the Raffles Hotel exterior which I don't think really is Raffles Hotel, Drake refers to it as ‘Hotel Imperial’. In his very sparse un-Raffles-like hotel room, Drake meets the buttoned-up “Director of the British Cultural Mission in Malaysia”—the British Council by any other name. It’s the first of two references to Singapore as being part of Malaysia, which shows that the episode was written before 9 August 1965 (it was broadcast in October that year) or that they didn’t really care too much about the political situation on the ground.
McGoohan has immense fun in this and many other scenes playing Drake/Simpson as an boorish drunk, prone to aggressive body-language and improvised Irish drinking songs – the actor was a notorious boozer in real-life. He insists the cultural director has a glass with him to quicken their friendship, and on being rejected, drops a knowing pun – “No Bond!” Simpson is due to lecture the locals on “the British way of life”, ironic, given that the region has already had far too much of this during many decades of colonial rule.
(The Franco-Chinese-Russian 'Linda Lee' played by Yvonne Furneaux)
One of the more bizarre tropes of foreign films shot in Asia in this period (60s through to late 70s) is the image of the Caucasian woman in a cheongsam (form-fitting Chinese style dress). Whereas white male heroes stubbornly flounder round the tropics in suits and ties, women are more inclined to ‘go native’. Obviously, it’s meant to be sexy and exotic without breaking the ‘taboo’ of inter-racial attraction. Here we have a particularly strange creation, ‘Linda Lee’ played by French starlet Yvonne Furneaux (who’d already acted for Fellini, Polanski and Antonioni) speaking with a bad Russian accent. She says she’s a journalist for the fictional ‘Singapore Evening News’, and she’s got one thing right: “Singapore is such a provincial town in so many ways”. Actually, she’s an “opposition” spy, who calls everyone Comrade and detests the bourgeois way of life. She drags Drake off blindfolded to see her master.
(I want to believe this is City Hall)
More stock footage! A clip of what looks like the road near City Hall, and this is possibly the only actual footage of Singapore in the whole episode, but I'm not entirely sure. There's some neon signs that look like they're from Hong Kong. But as the episode continues, they eventually give up trying and we’ll see some rickshaw drivers zipping through a Shepperton car-park.
('Those rickshaws are very useful)
A more straightforwardly racist trope of the Eurospy genre is the Caucasian male actor made-up to look like a sinister Chinese (Dr No is the most famous, although they’re all descendants of Fu Manchu), and here we have Peter Arne as Chi Ling, with truly horrible ‘slitty’ eye make-up and prone to a patronising bow and hand-clasp gesture (incidentally Arne was tragically murdered in 1983). Chi Ling’s meant to be a paranoid buffoon, who has glass furniture as “a security precaution, nothing can be hidden from me.” He trusts no-one. It’s all meant to be jolly hilarious.
(Peter Arne in Chinese drag)
Chi Ling intends to use Drake/Simpson to entrap the secret head of the British spy network in Malaysia (the second reference to the larger country, which is a big clue as to who the head actually is). Drake is driven off again, and then has to figure out that Chi Ling’s hide-out is actually the Singapore New Press building (see the banner at the top of this blog)! So the “opposition” have taken over the print media! Sadly, this is where the lovely Linda Lee will be shot dead by a Chinese heavy, for no good reason.
(SIngapore: Den of vice and sex)
Still acting sozzled, Drake pitches up at a Singapore bar-cum-brothel, modelled on the one from The World of Suzie Wong, mockingly spurns the advances of a English-accented bar girl, “out of my way you wanton lotus blossom!” and discovers that the British secret services run an ‘Operations Room’ behind a prostitute’s boudoir, staffed by the obligatory Burt Kwouk and Mike Pratt (Randall, from Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased). Here we discover that there’s an even more senior “opposition” leader who secretly broadcasts very declamatory Mandarin (quite a contrast to the barked Cantonese of Chi Ling’s heavies). Drake sets in motion a cunning plan, but not before he gives a talk on English madrigals, in homage to Holly Martin’s lecture in The Third Man, complete with obnoxious questioner at the end (can madrigals can be compared to The Beatles? An unconscious nod to Singapore’s struggle with rock and roll?).
In a double-twist, Drake uncovers that the “Director of the British Cultural Mission in Malaysia” (Geoffrey Bayldon, who’d return to ‘Singapore’ the following year in King Rat) is not only the chief British spy, but also the head of the “opposition”. When this is revealed, Drake darkly mutters “Not the first”, which feels like the one truly authentic espionage moment in the whole episode—this was only two years after Kim Philby and friends had been exposed as high-level Soviet moles in British intelligence. Drake’s plan, to trick Chi Ling into shooting his boss, succeeds, and the punchline calls back the “three thousand years” bit, with McGoohan imitating the Chi Ling’s bow and speech with the odious line, “as humble beginner… would be grateful for enlightenment”. A suitably smug end to Danger Man’s first and last excursion to Singapore.
Cue the demented harpsichord and long live the opposition!
(Singapore circa 1965... or is it?)
Patrick McGoohan in Singapore? Sadly, not this time; the exotic Orient encountered by super-spy John Drake in this 1965 episode of Danger Man (AKA Secret Agent in the US) is a stereotypical colonial fantasy conjured up on a soundstage in Shepperton studios with sundry pieces of ‘stock’ footage. No one involved left London. This was the typical strategy for constructing a fictional ‘Singapore’ in the pre-War era. Hollywood had done it many times before, including John Brahm’s Far East noir-adventure, Singapore in 1947. But from the start of the 60s, lighter cameras and cheaper air tickets popularised location shooting, even for b-movies, and by ‘65 there’d been several Sandokan films (based on Emilio Salgari’s Italian tales of heroic Malay piracy) and a few ‘Eurospy’ flicks making limited use of real Singapore and Malaysian locations. This episode of Danger Man, however, was for the telly, and then, as now, budgets and schedules were tight, and why hop on a plane for fifteen hours when you can make any locale in the world down in Studio B?
(McGoohan: Calculating coldness with an undertow of bizarre eccentricity)
Danger Man began in 1960 as a vehicle for the peculiar charisma of McGoohan, an American raised in Ireland and England, groomed for TV stardom by media mogul Lew Grade. The original series pre-dated the first James Bond film; and in retrospect we can see that the weekly hijinks of super-agent John Drake anticipate the entire Eurospy genre, and as the series got more, shall we say, baroque, it paved the way for the stylised antics of The Avengers (and dozens of imitators) as well as McGoohan’s pet project, The Prisoner. By 1965, Bond was big and McGoohan (who had an unusually authorial influence on his own series, even then) was supposedly intent on making John Drake a more downbeat, realistic counterpart to Ian Fleming’s creation. That’s not born out by this episode, which is lightly comic, and, in terms of plot, completely ludicrous; but it’s not without interest in depicting Singapore in the year of independence.
The set-up introduces Simpson, an embittered toff essayed by the wonderfully seedy Anthony Dawson, ranting to a blonde companion about “going out to Singapore to lecture for the British Cultural Mission…can’t get a decent job here in England”. There are many connections between James Bond and Danger Man, but casting Dawson is the most self-conscious—he’d had a part in Dr No and then became the body-double for 007’s pussy-stroking nemesis Blofeld in two sequels. Back in Danger Man, Simpson needs to prove he’s not just any old foreign talent, “You know I’ve got a very big job waiting for me in Singapore,” he assures us, repeating for good measure, “A very big job.” This sounds ominous! Pretty soon, Simpson is in the hands of the authorities, and in an inventive touch the Danger Man titles (with the great demented harpsichord theme tune) play over a silent sequence of John Drake chain-smoking his way through the interrogation (torture?) of Simpson. Ending in a crash-zoom on Anthony Dawson’s beleaguered face. The episode’s directed by Don Chaffey, a reliable pair of hands (who went on to direct Jason and the Argonauts), but aside from this flourish, his work here’s strictly pedestrian.
Anyway, the game’s afoot, Drake will fly to Singapore pretending to be Simpson to infiltrate “the opposition”, a phrase used many times as a euphemism for Communist spies (I don’t think the word Communist is ever used), the writer of this, David Stone, who’d written dialogue for Polanski’s Repulsion, could never have known the special resonance of the term “opposition” in Singapore then (or now), but he should’ve been aware that this was five years after the supposed defeat of Communist guerrilla warriors in the Malayan ‘Emergency’. Reds in the tropics of Southeast Asia were no joke—although as we shall see, this episode is determined to treat them like one.
Before his trip to Singapore, Drake gets a forged visa from Charles Carson, who’d played a spy in Hitchcock’s Secret Agent thirty years earlier, and warns Drake that the Chinese have been playing the “dangerous game” of spying for “three thousand years”. Then he gets gadgets from young Christopher Sandford, better known today as the biographer of Jagger, Cobain and Polanski. The casting in these shows is fascinating!
(Not the Raffles Hotel? Could be in London with a couple of rickshaws)
Stock footage time! A jet plane with the BOAC logo gives way to an impressive overhead cityscape of Singapore—complete with location title. Except it isn’t Singapore, it’s Hong Kong island. Then a glimpse of the Raffles Hotel exterior which I don't think really is Raffles Hotel, Drake refers to it as ‘Hotel Imperial’. In his very sparse un-Raffles-like hotel room, Drake meets the buttoned-up “Director of the British Cultural Mission in Malaysia”—the British Council by any other name. It’s the first of two references to Singapore as being part of Malaysia, which shows that the episode was written before 9 August 1965 (it was broadcast in October that year) or that they didn’t really care too much about the political situation on the ground.
McGoohan has immense fun in this and many other scenes playing Drake/Simpson as an boorish drunk, prone to aggressive body-language and improvised Irish drinking songs – the actor was a notorious boozer in real-life. He insists the cultural director has a glass with him to quicken their friendship, and on being rejected, drops a knowing pun – “No Bond!” Simpson is due to lecture the locals on “the British way of life”, ironic, given that the region has already had far too much of this during many decades of colonial rule.
(The Franco-Chinese-Russian 'Linda Lee' played by Yvonne Furneaux)
One of the more bizarre tropes of foreign films shot in Asia in this period (60s through to late 70s) is the image of the Caucasian woman in a cheongsam (form-fitting Chinese style dress). Whereas white male heroes stubbornly flounder round the tropics in suits and ties, women are more inclined to ‘go native’. Obviously, it’s meant to be sexy and exotic without breaking the ‘taboo’ of inter-racial attraction. Here we have a particularly strange creation, ‘Linda Lee’ played by French starlet Yvonne Furneaux (who’d already acted for Fellini, Polanski and Antonioni) speaking with a bad Russian accent. She says she’s a journalist for the fictional ‘Singapore Evening News’, and she’s got one thing right: “Singapore is such a provincial town in so many ways”. Actually, she’s an “opposition” spy, who calls everyone Comrade and detests the bourgeois way of life. She drags Drake off blindfolded to see her master.
(I want to believe this is City Hall)
More stock footage! A clip of what looks like the road near City Hall, and this is possibly the only actual footage of Singapore in the whole episode, but I'm not entirely sure. There's some neon signs that look like they're from Hong Kong. But as the episode continues, they eventually give up trying and we’ll see some rickshaw drivers zipping through a Shepperton car-park.
('Those rickshaws are very useful)
A more straightforwardly racist trope of the Eurospy genre is the Caucasian male actor made-up to look like a sinister Chinese (Dr No is the most famous, although they’re all descendants of Fu Manchu), and here we have Peter Arne as Chi Ling, with truly horrible ‘slitty’ eye make-up and prone to a patronising bow and hand-clasp gesture (incidentally Arne was tragically murdered in 1983). Chi Ling’s meant to be a paranoid buffoon, who has glass furniture as “a security precaution, nothing can be hidden from me.” He trusts no-one. It’s all meant to be jolly hilarious.
(Peter Arne in Chinese drag)
Chi Ling intends to use Drake/Simpson to entrap the secret head of the British spy network in Malaysia (the second reference to the larger country, which is a big clue as to who the head actually is). Drake is driven off again, and then has to figure out that Chi Ling’s hide-out is actually the Singapore New Press building (see the banner at the top of this blog)! So the “opposition” have taken over the print media! Sadly, this is where the lovely Linda Lee will be shot dead by a Chinese heavy, for no good reason.
(SIngapore: Den of vice and sex)
Still acting sozzled, Drake pitches up at a Singapore bar-cum-brothel, modelled on the one from The World of Suzie Wong, mockingly spurns the advances of a English-accented bar girl, “out of my way you wanton lotus blossom!” and discovers that the British secret services run an ‘Operations Room’ behind a prostitute’s boudoir, staffed by the obligatory Burt Kwouk and Mike Pratt (Randall, from Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased). Here we discover that there’s an even more senior “opposition” leader who secretly broadcasts very declamatory Mandarin (quite a contrast to the barked Cantonese of Chi Ling’s heavies). Drake sets in motion a cunning plan, but not before he gives a talk on English madrigals, in homage to Holly Martin’s lecture in The Third Man, complete with obnoxious questioner at the end (can madrigals can be compared to The Beatles? An unconscious nod to Singapore’s struggle with rock and roll?).
In a double-twist, Drake uncovers that the “Director of the British Cultural Mission in Malaysia” (Geoffrey Bayldon, who’d return to ‘Singapore’ the following year in King Rat) is not only the chief British spy, but also the head of the “opposition”. When this is revealed, Drake darkly mutters “Not the first”, which feels like the one truly authentic espionage moment in the whole episode—this was only two years after Kim Philby and friends had been exposed as high-level Soviet moles in British intelligence. Drake’s plan, to trick Chi Ling into shooting his boss, succeeds, and the punchline calls back the “three thousand years” bit, with McGoohan imitating the Chi Ling’s bow and speech with the odious line, “as humble beginner… would be grateful for enlightenment”. A suitably smug end to Danger Man’s first and last excursion to Singapore.
Cue the demented harpsichord and long live the opposition!
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