Anti-communist films sponsored by the US government in Singapore and Malaya: on the New York Sound Masters Inc.

ABSTRACT

This article examines anti-Communist films made by Hollywood in Cantonese and Malay in Singapore and Malaya in the Cold War context of the “Campaign of Truth.” In the early 1950s, the United State Information Agency, an arm of the State Department, secretly commissioned and funded New York Sound Masters Inc. to produce and shoot several anti-Communist films in Singapore and Malaya. In 1953, cinemas across Malaya and Singapore screened Singapore Story and Kampong Sentosa, two Cold War products of the “Campaign of Truth.” In addition to analysing the ideology of these films, this article also combines declassified archive material from the US and Singaporean National Archives with primary materials from UK, US, Singaporean, and Malayan periodicals from the Cold War era in order to explore how these two films use Malay and Cantonese to narrate a Hollywood’s version of the Singaporean story. As these two films have been largely passed over in scholarship and the films and archives have not been regularly accessible, records of these films are absent from histories of film and television in the US, Singapore, and Malaya. This article aims to remedy this absence.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold War
• Campaign of Truth
• United State Information Agency
• anti-communist films
• Reeves Eason
• New York Sound Masters Inc
• Singapore Story
• Kampong Sentosa

Acknowledgements

I am appreciative for Prof. Shen Shuang’s inviting me to present this article at the International workshop on “Comparative and Global Chinese Cultural Studies” organized by the Pennsylvania State University. I would also like to thank Prof. Wang Xiao-jue and other reviewers for their constructive feedback on this article. I am extremely grateful to Prof. David Wang Der-wei’s support during my time as a Fulbright scholar at Harvard University. My deepest gratitude goes to the National Archives at College Park, Maryland and the Harvard Film Archive for allowing me access to films and records; and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board for supporting my trip to US. Last but not least, I am grateful to Toh Hun-ping for assisting to research through old newspapers and archives.

Notes on contributor

Wai Siam Hee is Assistant Professor of Chinese and film at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has written extensively on cinematic and gender issues, with articles in the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas and Queer Sinophone Cultures. He is the author of From Amorous Histories to Sexual Histories: Tongzhi Writings and the Construction of Masculinities in Late Qing and Modern China. He has co-edited two books, including Transnational Chinese Cinema: Corporeality, Desire and The Ethics of Failure and Memorandum: A Reader of Singapore Chinese Short Stories. He has recently completed two book manuscripts. The first of these is entitled Post-Malaysian Chinese-language Film: Accented Style, Sinophone and Auteur Theory; the second is entitled The Cultural Production of Early Chinese-language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya Before and During the Cold War.

Notes

1 Also spelled B. Reaves Eason, as seen in the credits of his film Call of the Yukon (1938). However, the spelling “Reeves” was used in the credits of Kanpong Sentosa and Singapore Story, as well as in silent films such as The Sign of the Claw (1926). This article uses the spelling “B. Reeves Eason” throughout for consistency. In addition, some films, such as Mystery Mountain (1934) use his nickname, Breezy Eason.

2 Among “many action-filled scenes he handled was the famous chariot race in the silent version of Ben-Hur (1926), employing more than 40 cameramen; the exciting charge sequence in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and the burning of Atlanta sequence in Gone With the Wind (1939)” (Katz and Nolen 2012, 436).

3 Glenn Tryon was an actor, director, producer and screenwriter (Katz and Nolen 2012, 1465).

4 Paper Tiger was directed by B. Reaves Eason and the script was also written by him. It was only 24.79 minutes long.

5 The credits to Road to Kota Tinggi show that the production company was Asia Film Productions (Worsley 1953). However, the script records for this film (Frank 1953) show that Sound Masters Inc. remained behind the scenes. The director was Wallace Worsley Jr. (1908–1991). Asia Film Productions was a Hong Kong company which produced anti-Communist films. Its funding came from the US NGO, the Asia Foundation, which was sponsored and supported by the State Department.

6 The IIA is intimately related to the USIA: both are organizations under the State Department.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore under the Academic Research Fund Tier 1 Grant (RG73/17: On anti-Communist films sponsored by the UK and US governments in Southeast Asia during the Cold War period).