120 Malay Movies

Amir Muhammad

120 Malay Movies

Amir Muhammad

Introduction

Art is emotion.

- Alfred Hitchcock

“Demokrasi apa?”“Demokrasi terpimpin.”“Terpimpin kepala hotak kau!”

- from

3 Abdul

(1964), written and directedby P. Ramlee*

Why 120?

I started collecting VCDs of old Malay movies in 2007, andwound up with well over 200 titles. Most of the VCDs werelegitimate releases but some were (oh, what will you think of me?) pirated. Then I started writing this book in the middleof 2008.The idea: to watch the movies in chronological order,so that I could trace how things changed (or not) over time.I was primarily interested to see how the world as shown inthose films was different (or not) from the one we have today.I would start from the very earliest films — but, right away,some difficulties presented themselves.The first Malay-language movie was

Laila Majnun

. Almost all books tag this as a 1933 release, but Jan Uhdeand Yvonne Ng Uhde in their book

Latent Images: Film inSingapore

prove that the movie opened only on 27 March 1934.Therefore,

Laila Majnun

is a 1934 rather than a 1933 film. All feature-length movies in Malay that were releasedfrom 1934 to 1947 appear to be lost forever. These 20 or somovies had been consumed by the ravages of time (they wereon easily flammable nitrate film) or the Japanese Occupation.Therefore, I began with the oldest surviving Malayfilm,

Cinta

(1948). And I chose to end with

Laxmana Do ReMi

. When I started this book, I went along with the prevalent

* My unliteral translation on page 285

idea that this was a 1972 movie; I liked the idea of ending withthe year of my birth, for what is an ‘old movie’ but one madebefore one was born? It was only later, after reading Mustafar A.R. and Aziz Sattar’s

Filem-Filem P. Ramlee,

that I realised

Laxmana Do Re Mi

was released in May 1973. It thus shouldbe known as a 1973 movie (albeit completed in 1972). About 360 Malay movies were made in that period. Icouldn’t watch all of them, because a few dozen are lost! Theseinclude the ﬁrst colour movie

Buluh Perindu

(1953), theﬁrst

Pontianak

(1957) and its sequel

Dendam Pontianak

(also 1957). Some key works by prominent directors are alsomissing, the most obvious being P. Ramlee’s ﬁrst ﬁlm in KualaLumpur,

Si Tora Harimau Jadian

, and Hussain Haniff’s

Macbeth

adaptation

Istana Berdarah

, both from 1964.Even among the VCDs that I had, some were of suchbad quality that the actors sounded like they were speaking in tongues, with too many accidental ‘jump-cuts’ due to lostframes. So I had to ditch most of those, too.I therefore knew that this book would not take theform of a catalogue raisonné, or be an obsessively completistcompilation.Then I decided I didn’t even want to write about everysingle decent VCD I had. My attitude was to watch (or re-watch)only the ones that interested me. I pretended I was an actualmovie-goer at that time rather than an archeologist who wouldwant to see just everything. So, for example, if I saw a few purba(period) movies in a row, I could watch a few contemporary onesto cleanse my palette, even if it meant missing some purbamovies now considered important. I had a similar attitude tothe movie stars. If I found the actress KB whiny and the actor JS smarmy, I would skip many of their movies. Yes, it’s a totallysubjective selection.So I set a target of 120 movies. Why 120? Well, it’s mysarcastic way of saying that watching so many Malay moviesin a row would be akin to one of the tortures in the Marquis deSade book

120 Days of Sodom

120 Malay Movies

Amir Muhammad

120 Malay Movies

Amir Muhammad

Luckily, I was proven wrong. Many of these ﬁlms wereso fun that it was with some reluctance that I emerged fromthe experience of being submerged in them. Even the onesthat weren’t so great were often

interesting

in some way orother. Perhaps I could have extended the book to 150 or even160 titles. But then, what would the divine Marquis say?

A Potted History of the Malay Studio System

Old Malay movies were made by studios that usually controlledall means of production, distribution and exhibition. Thethree most prominent studios covered in this book are ShawBrothers’ Malay Film Production (which made 162 Malaymovies), Cathay-Keris Film (which made 121), and MerdekaFilm Productions (which made 90, including 30 after theperiod of this book).Shaw Brothers’ film-making arm was set up byShanghai-born Runme and Run Run Shaw, who were alreadyfilm exhibitors in Singapore and Malaya, in the late 1930s.Cathay-Keris started later, in the early 1950s, as a collaborationbetween Loke Wan Tho (of The Cathay Organisation, whichdistributed films) and the entrepreneur Ho Ah Loke (who hadproduced

Buluh Perindu

). Loke’s father was Loke Yew, oneof the ﬁrst prominent Chinese businessmen to have made animpact in British Malaya, back in the 19

century.These Singapore studios had actors, directors and crewunder contract. The stars were paid regular monthly salariesand lived in designated areas, with their image and publicappearances tightly controlled. So, for certain protractedperiods of time, you could instantly differentiate between aShaw film and a Cathay one by looking at not only the castbut the recycled studio locations. At their peak (from the late1950s to the mid-60s) audiences had new releases from thesecompeting studios practically every month. This was the goldenage of the Malay studio era. But the studio system, worldwide, was already wobblyby then. For example, the ‘vertical integration’ economicmodel of these companies was the subject of anti-trustlegislation in the United States, which sought to break upunfair monopolies. It was considered unhealthy for any onecompany to control so much of an industry. (Locally, this couldbe seen by how smaller, short-lived companies like Nusantaraand Maria Menado Productions had to swim with the twostudios or sink altogether.)The case of the Malay studio system was fraught furtherby internal factors (such as union disputes about working conditions, especially at Shaw) and external ones that affecteddistribution and exhibition (the Indonesian Confrontation;the Separation of Singapore from Malaysia).Merdeka Film Productions was the first studio in KualaLumpur; it was set up in the early 1960s by the entrepreneurH.M. Shah, who lured Ho Ah Loke away from Singapore tobe his partner. When the Singapore film-making branch of Shaw ceased operation in the late 1960s, many of the peopleemployed there moved to join Merdeka. But by then, audienceswere staying away from Malay movies, which seemed cheapand outdated. Merdeka wasn’t as well-equipped as Shaw andCathay were in Singapore, and the bosses wanted to keepchurning out movies at the old budget of $60,000 - 80,000per title, almost always in black and white, which invariablyseemed shoddy compared to not only Hollywood but also thecolour imports from Indonesia.The most expensive studio movie was Shaw’s

RajaBersiong

(1968), which cost $750,000 and took two years tomake. Although it’s an entertaining film, its box-office failurehelped to further hasten the demise of the studio system.The old way of making movies effectively stopped being viable in the mid-1970s. After that came the lamest periodof local cinema, the late 1970s and the 1980s, when smallindependent producers tried to get films going. It’s true thatthe cast and crew were now free to choose which company towork for, which media to speak to, and which neighbourhood

120 Malay Movies

Amir Muhammad

120 Malay Movies

Amir Muhammad

to live in, but this resulted in what Kierkegaard called, in adifferent context, the ‘anxiety of freedom’. Compare the ﬁlmsmade by A.R. Tompel in the studio era with the ones madeby his son A.R. Badul in the post-studio era and you will getmy drift.

Historical Events as Seen in Old Malay Cinema

1948 to 1972/3 was a dramatic quarter-century in this part of theworld. Among the events that took place were the Emergency,otherwise known as the anti-communist war (1948-1960),the Independence of Malaya (1957), the creation of Malaysia(1963), the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia (1965), theMay 13 riots (1969), and the start of the New Economic Policy(1970). Some of these events literally shaped our boundaries;others deﬁnitely shaped the way we see ourselves. Although most Malay movies did not comment directlyon these events, you can still get strong hints. Even lines like“The rubber prices fell again” or “My husband was killed bythe communists” are indicators of the anxieties of the period.Some topics are more cinema-ready than others. Theﬁrst two movies to deal exclusively with World War 2 came in1958 (

Matahari

and

Sergeant Hassan

), 13 years after the Japanese surrender. But, to date, there has been no movie todeal exclusively with, say, the Indonesian Confrontation or theMay 13 riots. The failure of subsequent local cinema to engagewith big events is a sign that cinema became less relevant as adiscursive force.Historical events could also impact the way a ﬁlmwas made, shown or received. The Indonesian Confrontationaffected Malay ﬁlm distribution because a lucrative potentialmarket was cut off. The only Indonesian co-production inthis book,

Bayangan di Waktu Fajar,

could not screen inIndonesia until after the hostilities ended; back in Malaysia, itflopped because people didn’t want to support anything from asuddenly hostile neighbour.Not many Malay movies commented on the 1957Independence, because the films were made in Singaporerather than Kuala Lumpur. But from 1963 onwards, therewas a rash of films that had optimistic scenes (which includednot only entire songs but small things like hotel signs) aboutthe excitement of being in a new nation. The films thatwere made in KL also sought to boost the town’s image, toshow that this new national capital wasn’t

that

far behindswinging Singapore!It wasn’t just ﬁlms with recognisably modern orcontemporary backdrops that could reﬂect the times. Anexample would be

Panglima Besi

(1964), a purba moviewhose anti-war theme certainly reﬂected the tense period of Konfrontasi, as well as lingering memories of World War 2 andthe Emergency.

Seeing Stars

Stars are chosen for their charisma, which is another way of saying sex appeal. The gorgeous men and women of the studioera made the research for this book very painless. I chose(although it’s not such a difﬁcult choice) to respond to cinemathe way Pauline Kael did, as can be seen in the titles of herbooks

I Lost it at the Movies

and

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

.In most of the films, the stars were bigger than theirroles. So I took the unorthodox decision of identifying thecharacters in most of the 120 chapters by referring to thenames of the actors/actresses instead of the names of the roles.It seems self-evident that a movie-goer, then and now, whendescribing what movie he or she just saw, would say, “P. Ramleeis a poor trishaw-puller who falls in love with Saadiah, who’s arich girl” rather than “Amran is a poor trishaw-puller who fallsin love with Azizah, who’s a rich girl.”I realise this runs the risk of conflating an actor withhis role, but I think this elementary confusion actuallymakes movie-going pleasurable, because it creates cinematicshorthand. Most stars became identified with only ‘good’ or