Pretty Polly AKA A Matter of Innocence, Guy Green, 1967/1968
In the years following independence in 1965, Singapore’s local film industry may have been the verge of extinction, but the city-state briefly became the place to make movies. Or at least to talk about making them…
Between 1966 and
’69, the local papers frequently reported the arrival of producers from Europe
or America intending to film in Singapore, breathlessly listing reasons why it would
be a wonderful place to shoot. The combo of tropical, visual other-ness with
widely spoken English, great hotels, food and relative freedom from crime,
corruption and political instability (while Indochina is burning), made it a
perfect location for Asia-set stories. In that brief period a dozen Singapore-bound
“big budget” projects were announced as imminent, but by 1970, only two had
been made, Pretty Polly (1967/68) and The Virgin Soldiers (1969). All the rest fell
apart and were swiftly forgotten.
The bubble of
interest in Singapore as a shooting location for large-scale English-language ‘Hollywood’
films, had more or less evaporated by 1970. Instead the Lion City became the
occasional setting for B-movie programme fillers, Eurotrash James Bond rip-offs,
Italian pirate flicks, and slushy TV movies.
To this day,
Pretty Polly and The Virgin Soldiers are the only Hollywood studio-backed films
to be shot in Singapore (Saint Jack doesn’t count; although it was certainly a
‘Hollywood’ movie, its producer Roger Corman was (and is) a true independent). Neither
of them are particularly well remembered today, Pretty Polly has never even been
released on VHS or DVD.
There are strange
synchronicities between them. Both ostensibly British pictures part-financed
(and later distributed) by Hollywood studios (Universal for Polly and Columbia
for Soldiers); both featured well-known young actresses and character actors of
the era; both had famous screenwriters but journeymen directors; both adapted
from literary sources based on the author’s experiences of visiting Singapore;
and finally both are ‘rites-of-passage’ stories, portraying youthful
protagonists losing their virginity to Singaporean lovers of questionable
morality. As the colonial era ended, and the old men stayed or went home to die,
the next generation came to Singapore to get (literally) fucked, an experience
that would change them forever.
I’m going to
take a long overdue look at these films, return to their literary sources and
authors, explore the movies themselves, the ways they were adapted and how they
adapted to their ‘real’ locations, and through the newspaper archives learn
something about how the films were received. As usual I’m interested in the
ways Singapore has been captured, fictionalised and transformed by cinema. But
I’m also curious about this particular period, a crucial transitional moment
when the Malay film studios were ceasing production; the ‘new’ Singapore was
looking abroad (i.e. to visitors from Europe and Hollywood) for recognition,
endorsement and excitement; and how the dream of Singapore as a cinematic
gateway to Asia quietly died.
By the mid
1960s, when Coward’s only Singapore-set short story Pretty Polly Barlow was
published in a collection of the same name, he was well past his prime. In
plays and songs the louche, satirical and provocative polymath had tapped into
an idiosyncratic sense of Englishness with immense popularity from the 1920s into the dark days of World War Two. During the ‘60s however, Coward’s new
plays failed to catch the public imagination, but he remained an iconic
presence on screen and stage, and his pre-war theatre successes were in
constant revival, especially among expatriate theatre troupes in the crumbling
and former colonies.
Pretty Polly
Barlow is reputed to be one of his favourite stories. Though published in 1965
it’s likely that it was originally written (or at least sketched out) years
before. It harks back, without nostalgia, to an earlier era of Singapore, the overheated
British colony that Coward first visited in March 1930, during a
round-the-world trip, exactly the kind taken by Aunt Eva and Polly in the
story, except Coward was accompanied on his travels by his deceitful American
lover, Jack Wilson.
In Singapore,
and more specifically the Raffles Hotel, where Coward stayed, he encountered a young
company of English actors,‘The Quaints’, doing the rounds of expat enclaves.
They were playing at Raffles' Jubilee Theatre at the time, and famously, when
an actor fell ill, Coward gamely stepped in and took the role of Stanhope in
R.C. Sherriff’s First War drama Journey’s End with five days rehearsal.
“However one may disagree with Noel Coward’s conception of Stanhope”, sniffed (Singapore's main newspaper) The Straits Times in its review, “Noel Coward’s acting is worth going a long
way to see.” The young leading man of the company was John Mills, who’d become
a close friend, and whose daughter Hayley would so many years later play Polly.
Coward returned
to Singapore at least twice in the 1930s, but there’s no account of any visits
after the war. Reading Pretty Polly Barlow, he seems scarcely aware of the rapid rate
of transformation that the country was undergoing, but there are a few
indications that he’d refreshed his knowledge. Polly’s first sight of the
island, as she approaches it on the cruise ship is “muddled and gray and rather
sinister”, and she discerns skyscrapers through the murk. Much later, in one of
the story’s key scenes, she visits "a strip of beach where there was a
ruined gun emplacement half hidden by oleander trees", and this is all we get
of history, the war and the failure of empire. The crucial role played by
contact lenses in the plot signifies post-1950s, and there is a single topical
reference to indicate the story is actually taking place in the 1960s; a
cattish remark about boring plays at the Royal Court in London (a favourite
Coward bugbear).
Revealingly,
Coward’s description of Bugis Street is frozen in the 1930s, “Every nationality
in the world seemed to be represented in the endless procession of tightly
packed humanity shuffling slowly along.” Then he refers disparagingly to
the “ubiquitous whores, none of whom
were young or even remotely attractive”. Although the definitive history of
Bugis Street has yet to be written (someone please do this!), it’s known
anecdotally that the culture of transvestite and transexual prostitutes (which
Coward would surely have remarked upon) began only in the 1950s. Before the war
it had been a more conventional red-light district lined with Chinese and
Japanese brothels. The ‘new’ post-war Bugis Street, with its glamorous
‘ladies’, is captured in the film version of Pretty Polly, but we’ll get to
that later.
Coward was fascinated with the
shifting morality of the modern era, particularly in regard to youth, sexuality
and romance. Ugly Ducking/Cinderella figure Polly, an apparently boring
shop-girl in her early 20s rendered fatally unattractive by “aggressive
spectacles” is plucked out of a drab suburban existence by well-to-do and
repellently snobbish Aunt Eva, to be her gopher on a round-the-world cruise. We
meet them as they arrive in Singapore, supposedly to be met Eva’s “black sheep”
brother Robert Hook, a rubber planter and old Asian hand who lives “fifty miles
of jungle road” up country. But Uncle Bob sends his excuses, claiming to have a
terrible fever, and Amazahudin, an elegant Eurasian (half Indian and half
Chinese we're told, with a Muslim-sounding name), a ‘tour guide’ who speaks in that absurdly
over-articulated way of ‘Indian’ characters (written by English men) of the time.
Almost immediately, Polly is filled with desire. Loathsome Aunt Eva checks into
Raffles, consuming "three large gin slings" and a lot of prawn curry,
and checking out from a stroke. Singapore kills her in a matter of hours.
This is Polly’s
chance to wake up and start living, and she seizes it without hesitation. Amaz
seduces her that very night (her virginity lost on the beach), and he organises
what we’d now call a ‘makeover’ in the form of contact lenses (finally getting
rid of those glasses) and a new bouffant hairdo courtesy of the “screaming”
Ambrose Wah Hai (Singaporeans with improbable Western/Chinese names are a
running – and unfunny - joke). Then Uncle Bob shows up, assuming his niece to be
a quivering wreck, but discovers the newly transformed Polly, a creature he
beholds in equal parts admiration and horror. Bob’s accompanied by Lorelei
Chang, "one of the most highly paid models in Singapore", and also "a
pampered little sexpot". He also reveals to Polly that Amaz is "an
oversexed little rabbit", whose mixed race, in Bob’s eyes (and quite
possibly Coward’s), is a sign of corrupt morality. None of this much impresses
Polly, whose trajectory to becoming an independent woman of the world is
unstoppable. Although Polly’s in charge, it’s hardly a proto-feminist tale. She
knows she can’t settle for foreign, exotic Amaz (although she adores him) rather
she pragmatically sets her sights on Rick Barlow (They already share a last
name!), a too-good-to-be-true handsome American millionaire with whom she
leaves Singapore. Marriage, money, babies and the good life await!
Coward presents Singapore as a zone of erotic
possibilities. Amaz (Bob tells Polly) is a gigolo and Lorelei (Amaz tells
everyone) started off her career at the Yum Yum bar “sleeping with every Tom,
Dick and Harry for a drink of beer and a cheese sandwich.” The purser of the
ship that brings Polly to town demonstrates a typical night for a single male
visitor to Singapore: picking up a Eurasian girl in the “New World pleasure
gardens”, after which he visited “several bars, eaten, hazily, a confused
Chinese dinner, and finished up, sexually incompetent but defiantly
cheerful."
But things are
more interesting than that. Uncle Bob is portrayed as something of an ageing stud,
somewhat different from the whoring expats of Paul Theroux’s Saint Jack. He
works out on a rowing machine to keep in shape and lured Lorelei away from her
rich Chinese businessman lover because of mututal lust. In one curious passage,
Bob stops off after the dusty ride into Singapore at the Adelphi Hotel
bathrooms to freshen up, flirtatiously encountering a male toilet attendant who
gives him a massage. Much later when Bob reminds Lorelei that Amaz is an “old
friend”, her reply “Everyone in Singapore knows that” and the angry,
threatening response it elicits is certainly suggestive. The only explicitly
gay character is Ambrose, who shows up at Bugis Street with his German sailor
friend, Gunther, who inevitably speaks no English (“but we manage”). Arguably
Coward isn’t here to judge anyone’s desires, but Polly will leave Singapore for
a great (conventional) life, and the rest will remain in the Lion City, leading
their exciting, but somewhat tawdry “secret, sinful” lives.
In July 1966,
only a year after it was published, the story was dramatised as a television
play on Britain’s commercial channel, ITV, to some acclaim. A studio-filmed
production, it was part of the ‘Armchair Theatre’ series of one-off TV dramas.
It was (unusually for the slot) 90 minutes long and starred Lynn Redgrave as
Polly (Redgrave would ‘return’ to Singapore for The Virgin Soldiers) and adapted
by American playwright William Marchant, a personal friend of Coward’s. It’s
possible that its modest triumph on TV encouraged a bigger budget, starrier
version to quickly go into production. At the time the budget for the movie
Pretty Polly was reported as being six and a half million dollars (which in
today’s money would be around 45 million bucks), a very serious budget in 1967.
Keith Waterhouse
and Willis Hall, a power-house writing team of that era, were tasked with the
adaptation. They’d first collaborated on a stage adaptation of Waterhouse’s
novel Billy Liar, then later the movie (and still later, the TV series). By
’66, when they got the job on Pretty Polly, they were also doing an uncredited
rewrite on Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain.
At the end of
February 1967, former child-star sensation, Hayley Mills arrived in Singapore
to begin filming Pretty Polly on location. At age 12, after one British film, Mills had been embraced by Walt Disney’s emerging live action
studio, becoming their ‘starlet’ for six years (in such ‘classics’ as Pollyanna
and The Parent Trap), and became one of the most popular child actors in the world. By the time she arrived in Singapore she was 20 and attempting, with mixed
fortunes, to make the transition to more ‘grown-up’ material. Famously her
‘boyfriend’ was film producer Roy Boulting, thirty years her senior (and whom
she would later marry), and this combination of fame, youth and worldliness
made Mills a source of constant fascination for the The Straits Times, who followed
the production doggedly, mostly to report on Mills’ appearance (see-through
dress, Cheongsam, glasses, smoking). What she felt about this attention is not
recorded, but it’s worth noting the timing of the date the actress left
Singapore - 17 April, the day before her 21st birthday.
One of her main
co-stars in Polly was Trevor Howard as Bob Hook. Upon arrival, the lengendary
British actor gruffly lied to The Straits Times, “I haven’t starred in a
British film for 17 years.” Despite languishing in a lot of mediocre Hollywood
fare he’d been Oscar nominated seven years earlier for Jack Cardiff’s film of
Sons And Lovers. A notorious alcoholic, Howard was in his mid-50s by ’67 but
looked older; overweight and slightly frail (especially when required to wear a
sarong), hardly the rugged, sexual adventurer that Coward describes.
Shashi Kapoor,
cast alongside Mills as her lover Amaz, had also been a child star, but his
career had only flourished and by the 1960s he was the romantic leading man of Bollywood, more famous than ever
before. Before Pretty Polly he’d taken the bold step of acting in early James
Ivory-Ruth Prawer Jhabvala collaborations, The Householder (1963), and
Shakespeare-Wallah (1965), both uncommercial, low-budget films, the latter of
which also involved a romance between him and a young English woman (Felicity
Kendal). Pretty Polly was another move in that direction, but it took him away
from India, and was on paper at least, a more mainstream prospect.
Director Guy
Green had been David Lean’s cinematographer for his early black and white films
(Green had an Oscar for Great Expectations, one of the most beautiful films
ever shot). He’d switched to directing in the mid-1950s, but the results were
mixed, a number of largely forgotten war films had led him to The Angry Silence
(1960), The Mark (1961), and A Patch of Blue (1965), with Sidney Poitier, also
exploring interracial romance, but in the highly charged atmosphere of the
American South at the time. These were largely somber, gritty films (with big stars), Pretty Polly, a light, colourful comedy (albeit touching on
race and sexuality) was a complete departure in terms of pace and style.
The first images
in Pretty Polly are proudly ‘on location’: flashes of painted, smiling Buddhas
(from Haw Par Villa), pans and zooms across Chinatown (the neon-lit outline
of the Majestic Cinema), the Supreme Court, sea-side fruit stalls, a skyscraper,
some HDB flats, the Singapore river. We’re far from an ersatz tropicana. In the
midst of this an aged hawker pushes his cart by and grins disconcertingly at
the camera, a statement, if ever there was one, that what we’re seeing is real.
Michel Legrand’s addictively jaunty, repetitive theme plays over all of this,
giving way to the voice of Aunt Eva (“Singapore… that’s another place you’ll
see”), and we’re suddenly in London, and it’s raining. Bespectacled Polly is
going to meet her Aunt who will make her fateful offer. The message is clear,
Singapore is tropical, fascinating and strange, and London is wet and very dull.
And then it’s goodbye to Mum at the bakery stall (warning about the dangers of
foreigners), and we’re back to where we want to be. Singapore. And Polly gets
the full James Bond treatment: Matt Monroe crooning ‘Pretty Polly’ with lyrics
by Don Black (“Soon you will awake/and you’ll want to take/the world”), while a
Maurice Binder title sequence juxtaposes a silhouetted, shadow-puppet ‘Polly’ blue
screened against the approaching Lion City. Polly gazes at the exact sights (a
breast-feeding mother and a sailor bathing himself) that Coward describes in
the first paragraphs of the story.
Indeed,
much of the film plays out remarkably faithfully, Waterhouse/Halll take long
stretches of dialogue and scenes verbatim, clearly in admiration of Coward’s
witty, acid banter. The opening is accurate, right down to the “ancient
Cadillac” that Amaz brings to pick them up at the Quayside. Although the trip
to Raffles Hotel becomes an opportunity to deviate, not only to squeeze Bob and
Lorelei into the story much earlier (Bob’s attempts to evade Aunt Eva on a
trishaw leads to some crude slapstick mayhem with cars and fruit stalls), but
for Polly to ‘see’ more of Singapore, including rows of HDB washing bamboos, a street
barber and temples. Throughout, the film can’t resist ocassionally lapsing into
a pure tourist-documentarian gaze, catching images, gestures and reactions of
the real locations on the fly, before cutting back to the characters, or even
placing them right into the spectacle.
The
death of Aunt Eva (played by Brenda de Banzie, a veteran stage actress
best known for playing Laurence Olivier’s wife in The Entertainer) is a
deliberate non-event in the Coward; she falls ill in her room after lunch,
calls Polly, and then Polly calls for a doctor, and Amaz waits with her, initiating
their courtship as Eva fades away. Coward then cuts (quite cinematically) to
Bob’s reaction to the news of Eva’s death on the phone, “Goddamn bloody hell!” Instead,
the film sets Eva’s demise at the hotel swimming pool, where lithe European and
American guys flirtatiously frolic with bikini-clad Chinese girls (shot at the
Goodwood Park Hotel pool; a decade later a very similar scenario would be staged
there by Peter Bogdanovich for Saint Jack). Eva, clad in a
ridiculously prudish bathing suit, finishes her lunch poolside and after belittling
Polly for a final time slowly submerges into the deep end and doesn't surface. Cut
to a Mount Alvernia ambulance speeding past the famous BP de Silva jewelry
shop, and then a further shift to the tranquil hospital, where Amaz consoles
Polly, then finally we cut to Bob hanging up the phone in Johor. Bob and
Lorelei then play out a scene from the story where Bob proposes driving down to
Singapore right away, and Lorelei literally seduces him into postponing the
trip. Unfortunately, it’s depressingly enacted. Trevor Howard unenthusiastically
caresses the bare midriff of Kalen Liu (a Hong Kong model who’d been in Burt
Kennedy’s Welcome to Hard Times) and then lunges into a clumsy mix of a hug and
a kiss.
After
Eva’s death, Amaz and Polly’s mutual courtship sticks closely to the story,
with minor changes. Waterhouse/Hall play up Amaz’s discomfort at financial
transactions (paying bills), to show us that he’s out of his league, he also
seems to be known by everyone they come across, implying he’s quite the player
on the Singapore (The Jack Flowers of his day). Crucially, the handsome American
Rick is no longer (and improbably) called Rick Barlow, rather he’s Rick Preston, visiting hotelier and man-about-town. As incarnated with bug-eyed, grinning intensity
by lightweight song and dance man Dick Patterson, Rick is no longer a Prince
Charming, rather he’s charming sleazebag, not without attraction for Polly.
Inevitably
Polly’s adventures take her around the island. The crew shot in Singapore for
seven weeks and certainly made the best of it. A short walk and talk between
Raffles Hotel and a Japanese restaurant is an excuse to see the grotesque
Chinese sculptures of Haw Par Villa (the Tiger Balm family-owned ‘attraction’,
which depicts various hells, used in several spy moves of the period). Polly’s
virginity is lost on a rustic looking East Coast beach, complete with Malay
fisherman wandering around, and when she and Amaz return there the next morning
for a sentimental goodbye, there’s a kampong in the background. Along Jalan Sultan, Polly gets contact lenses and hairdo, but not before we witness a lavish
Chinese funeral procession - the first thing that Polly sees with her ‘new’
eyes. The spectacle was certainly staged: we glimpse the whole street scene through
a second-storey shophouse window, and many extras stare straight back at
us. The hapless ships’ purser Critch (drunkenly escaping from a money-grabbing tart)
manages to get mixed up in the ritual, another episode of awful slapstick (the film has several).
Nevertheless, the funeral is captured in a series of curious, documentary-style
close-ups, of musicians, masks, decorations and faces.
British
Forces school English teacher, David Prosser plays hair stylist Ambrose as a
camp Australian. He must have been a last minute replacement, because the shop
signboard still says ‘Ambrose Wah Lai’. Pretty Polly would be Prosser’s only
film.
In
the second half we take the trip to Bugis Street (both a “jolly”
and an “evil” place, according to Amaz), a perennial source of fascination for
tourists and film-makers arriving in Singapore during this era. Polly and Amaz
wander through a somewhat staged bustle, but cut away to ‘real’ glimpses of
transvestites (Two decrepit colonels comment on the “chappies”, just so we’re
clear), good time ang mohs, and hawkers frying noodles. Drunk, and surrounded
by attentive males, Polly declares, “I’ve never been so happy in all my life.”
Then, the merry-makers, led by Rick, Ambrose, his boyfriend Gunther and the
sailors decide to go to a party (“there’s always a party”) on “127 Racetrack
Road). They wake some sleeping Trishaw guys to get there, iniating a ‘madcap’
trishaw race through the streets similar to the one in Five Ashore in Singapore;
slapstick silliness that's a desperate attempt to produce laughs and
energy. Amaz gets stuck with the slowest driver, allowing him to speak the film’s
only Singlish – “Chop chop lah!”
In
an effort to generate dramatic heft that's not present in
Coward’s story, Waterhouse/Hall create an antagonism between Amaz and Rick
and bring it to the boil at the party on "Racetrack Road" - the film’s heart of
darkness. If Polly’s in Singapore to look for excitement and sexual abandonment,
this is where she’ll find it, but there’s a price to be paid. Downstairs in this semi-abandoned hotel, which according to my fellow blogger Toh Hun Ping is probably not the Mitre Hotel (a notorious hang-out for spies and divers to which it bears a passing similarity), a throng of young revellers (a mix
of foreigners and locals) groove out, and one young lady performs an (off-screen)
striptease. Polly explores the hotel, observed and pursued by Rick, as she finds
couples kissing, men gambling with girls in their underwear, and further up, a
gang of men salaciously chase a girl into a room. At the top of the house she discovers an
entire Chinese family, complete with crying babies, cooking a meal. Rick appears
and she wonders if they should “return to civilisation”, but he has one last
thing to show her, a sad little bedroom, sparsely decorated with a few pin-ups
and a metal (single) bed. Polly quickly surmises that this is where Rick intends
to fuck her and although she states plainly, “I’m not going to make love to
you.” Rick kisses her. Amaz interupts the seduction and throws an embittered Rick
out.
In
departing from the Coward, one can see that Pretty Polly might be viewed as
Amaz’s story after all. It's the tale of (as Rick summarises) “the King of the Fixers…
meets the woman next door” and discovers his moral compass. Amaz is played pretty
brilliantly by Kapoor. He can do the silly sentence constructions effortlessly, and yet shows the profound unease of this charming man. It’s
a complex, somewhat unfathomable character, mainly because he’s seen largely from Polly's point-of-view, and it’s a powerful moment when he reveals that the cheap bedroom they
are standing in, the one where Rick was about to bed her, is in fact his home. That's when he's finally exposed. Amaz
is an empty man, a fake Singaporean, fake tour-guide and a fake lover, and the
ultimate gesture of love is to show that to Polly. It’s the film’s best scene,
when all the jollity, slapstick, risque innuendo and tourism gives way to some
real pain.
Unlike
the story, where Polly has snaffled Aunt Eva’s jewellry and is happy to
leave Singapore for her happy-ever-after with Rick in Hong Kong, it’s Amaz in
the film who tells her go back home, and she who doesn’t want to go. Back at
the beach as the sun comes up they get existential – Polly says he’s a “good
person”, and Amaz says that’s only because of her, “I am what I am, and you are
what you have become.” He’s just a part of her journey, not the place she wants
to go. As they walk away, back towards the kampong, the shots of fishing boats
moored in the sand and the sound of a tropical dawn (and a plane coming into
Changi) are pretty staggering, and it’s the one time when the film brings
together fiction and reality into something seamless.
There
follows another invented scene of Polly visiting Bob at his “Chichak Buloh” rubber
plantation with some Malay workers. It appears tacked on to give Trevor Howard another substantial scene,
and for him to say the (nonsensical) line “The sun sets on the empire and it gets bloody freezing
cold at night.” There’s some nice Johor scenery as they drive to his house and
the revelation that Bob is just a manager; he represents all that can go wrong
if you stay in Asia past your welcome. He tells her to take Eva’s money
and keep travelling, which gets her back on the boat, thinking about Amaz while
a handsome young (white) man eyes her up on deck and the parrot is waiting for her in the
cabin - ending the film exactly the way Coward’s story closes.
After
seven weeks the Pretty Polly cast and crew left Singapore for London, where
they’d spend two weeks shooting interiors (Raffles’ hotel rooms, the ships
cabins, the London prologue). The producer Sydney Streeter (who’d worked with
Powell and Pressburger) was effusive in his thanks to everyone in Singapore. They'd had full co-operation.
A
few months later, The Straits Times ran ‘How Pretty Polly Benefited The
Republic’, which broke down the statistics: 85 trishaws, 35 boats and 132
hawker stalls had been “hired for the screening (sic)”, and quoted
Cathay-Keris’ English boss Tom Hodge, “many films with Eastern backgrounds can
be expected to be made in the near future”. As their studio’s home-grown
products declined, Cathay were keen to partner up with all the foreign crews,
and Hodge was always quoted in the press on these matters.
Pretty
Polly was finished quickly, premiering in London in October 1967. In January
’68 it was retitled (rather dully) A Matter of Innocence and released in the US
to little fanfare. Renata Adler in the New York Times gave it a pasting,
pointing out that it was similar but not as good as Shakespeare-Wallah. She had
a real problem with Amaz’s dialogue, hearing it as “imperialistic” but
acknowledging that it “is always interesting to find any film that tries to
depict in any way at all the lives of Westerners… who are trying to live in and
come to grips with the problems of the East.”
By
Christmas ‘67, The Straits Times were hyping it up as “one of the most
entertaining films ever to hit the screen here” and promising its release in
the New Year. But that didn’t happen. Mysteriously, after all the excitement
and hubbub over the shoot, the film was never released in Singapore, it wasn’t
even submitted to the censors. There was no follow-up, certainly no Saint
Jack-like denunciation of its negative depiction of Singapore, it just simply
disappeared. I'll speculate that as it was something of a flop internationally, no one wanted much more to do with it.
Watching Pretty Polly today, one can see why it's been forgotten: it’s tonally uneven (not in a good way), crudely lurching between
sentimentality and cynicism, broad, painful slapstick and sensitive drama. It has the
faintly embarassing air of people from an older generation telling a story that
they’re convinced is shocking, and trying and failing to plug into the late
1960s zeitgeist. There is something to
be said for how it develops Coward’s premise, finding the connection between a
young woman ‘becoming’ the person she’s capable of being and a confused young
man who trades on the false glamour of tourism, but craves something real. It’s
not a good film, but it works effectively as metaphor: Amaz is Singapore.
For an amazing visual journey into the locations and the colonial mindset of Pretty Polly, please visit Toh Hun Ping's series of posts on the film, which trace exactly where the film was shot and how those places have evolved or been demolished over the years. I can't recommend this highly enough.
For an amazing visual journey into the locations and the colonial mindset of Pretty Polly, please visit Toh Hun Ping's series of posts on the film, which trace exactly where the film was shot and how those places have evolved or been demolished over the years. I can't recommend this highly enough.
