Introduction

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a turbulent period in Hong Kong history. Rapid social and political changes were taking place as a younger, local-born generation became more vocal in opposing British colonial policies and practices. Around the same time, a unique Hong Kong popular culture and identity began to take shape – an evolution in which television and cinema played no small part. While these developments are well known, this essay will shed light on the so far neglected role of the crime thriller in the indigenisation of Hong Kong cinema. The city's Cantonese and Mandarin film industries had been producing crime films since mid-century, but in the late 1960s a radical shift took place in the genre that still reverberates today. This break with the past was a phenomenon in the industry at large: in general, male stars replaced female ones, while action substituted for melodrama. The roots of Hong Kong's celebrated crime films of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s are thus properly traced to this period.

The decision to deal with the history of the crime thriller in this anthology on Hong Kong film noir might need some explanation. Unlike 1940s and 1950s Hong Kong noir, which appeared mostly in the form of melodramas, more recent Hong Kong noir films are almost exclusively situated in the (action) crime genre exemplified by the output of John Woo in the 1980s and Johnnie To's Milkyway Image in the late 1990s and 2000s. It thus makes sense to look at the roots of the modern crime thriller in the 1970s. This essay will argue that the modern Hong Kong crime film to some extent sprouted from the kungfu cinema of the early 1970s. It will also argue that current noir films from Hong Kong have their roots in the martial arts films of that decade: while a full-blown Hong Kong noir trend would only begin to materialise in the late 1980s, the seeds for this development were already present several years earlier.