Wong Tin-lam's The Wild, Wild Rose (aka Love of the Wild Rose), released into Hong Kong theatres on 5 October 1960, remains critically well received and popular today. Shu Kei describes it as ‘the most distinguished film among MP&GI's [Motion Pictures and General Investment Ltd] 200-odd library … arguably the most extraordinary Mandarin film of the 1960s’. Described as a noir musical, Rose may not be Hong Kong's first noir, but in its style and genre blending, it serves as the apotheosis of early Hong Kong noir, raising the bar for Hong Kong noirs/neo-noirs to come, anticipating standard mixed genres of future Hong Kong film, and creating urban visuals that comment on the Hong Kong of its day. While discussions continue as to whether noir is a genre or style, attuned audiences, academic and popular alike, know noir when seeing it, paradoxically and simultaneously drawn into and forbidden from its world. The widely recognised noir signatures – visual style (blackand-white photography, low-key lighting and shadow effects, low-angled, dutched and disorienting camerawork), downbeat, alienated characters, and cynical attitudes towards life – define a body of work, referenced by the historical period of distinctive output, from 1941 to 1953. With the Western and lush Hollywood musical, film noir may be a truly American nostalgic formation. Most of its screenwriters, the story material on which the movies are based, and its cinematographers are American-born, while some major directors – from Curtiz to Wilder – were émigrés to Hollywood. Hollywood noir style widely influenced cinema, from Melville's Le Samourai (1967) to Woo's Hard-Boiled (1992). Colour Hollywood productions like Polanski's Chinatown (1974) and Hanson's L.A. Confidential (1997) are set in 1940s Los Angeles and are more realistic tonally than the earlier historical period. The corruption-oozing Chinatown, an origin story of contemporary Los Angeles development, serves as our consummate noir. Set in Los Angeles, Ridley Scott's cyberpunk Blade Runner (1982) offers up tech noir, set in the near future, its technological gadgetry and plotting reflecting a gritty realism rather than nostalgia.

Rose draws upon several period American noirs and tweaks them, synthesising noir style with melodrama and musical. In searches of international cinema, I’ve discovered no films combining musical, noir and melodrama in such a hybrid form.