If it is true to say that the film noir remains one of the most unstable, amorphous and contested of film genres – with even its status as such, as a distinct generic entity, being called into question by a number of scholars and critics who would rather categorise it as a style, a historical moment, a cycle, a series, a mood – then it follows that it should find a responsive home in the quixotic universe of Hong Kong filmmaking. In a quasi-national cinema more than commensurate to a disparate confluence of genres, the fluid boundaries of even the canonical wave of Hollywood noir films that predominated between 1944 and 1958 would appear to offer a model that could be readily assimilated into its paradigmatic stylistic and narrative norms. Indeed, quite apart from the oftquoted designation of Hong Kong as a ‘Hollywood of the East’ (which signifies more than just the local and international commercial dominance of their respective industries), one may point to the fact that a certain self-reflexive potentiality can be located within the noir canon. It may even be argued that film noir represents the first real site of cinematic experimentation within classical Hollywood, with works such as Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947), Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948) and Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) employing complex, convoluted narrational strategies that frustrate the narrative and stylistic transparency inherent in studio-era US filmmaking, while conversely many of the most esoteric and ambitious Hollywood films in recent memory – such as the works of Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher (especially Fight Club [1999]), Christopher Nolan (Memento [2000]) and Steven Soderbergh (The Underneath [1995]) – adapt and appropriate the tenets of noir as an organising principle, a register within which to frame their variously circumscribed and fatalistic stories.

Moreover, like the melodrama (in many respects its generic mirror image), film noir operated within a heightened register of visual expressivity, becoming a loaded adjective (noir-esque) that could then be applied to other, ostensibly diverse, genres.