MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of of Tom Cunliffe’s review of Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986, by Kristof Van den Troost. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/cunliffe/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986
By Kristof Van den Troost
Reviewed by Tom Cunliffe
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April, 2025)
Kristof Van den Troost, Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986 Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 256 pages, ISBN 9781399521772 (Paperback)/ 9781399521765 (Hardback).
The term “Hong Kong crime film” conjures up numerous images, and ubiquitous among them would probably be Chow Yun-fat 周潤發 wielding dual pistols in a John Woo movie. But what of the rich history of Hong Kong crime cinema and its many sub-genres from the 1950s to the mid-1980s before Woo and others came along and shook the industry up? What of this genre’s complex relationship with Hong Kong society? How have crime films continuously exploited ambiguities in their representation of cops and gangsters? How did the politics of image making develop as colonial censorship protocols morphed? And how was cinematic realism shaped by a contesting array of forces? Kristof Van den Troost sets out to answer these questions and many more in this passionately written and extremely well researched study of Hong Kong crime films during this period. In the process, it lays out a huge watchlist for any crime film aficionado of films rarely written about in English or Chinese. Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986 fills in several blanks in Hong Kong film history in its exhaustive coverage of the various sub-genres within Hong Kong crime cinema before the explosive success of A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色, 1986) kickstarted the heyday of the genre in the mid-to-late 1980s. Such achievements could inspire further research projects on Hong Kong film and media history. Understanding the roots and development of the crime film genre also explains the genre’s continuing popularity in Hong Kong, as exemplified by the recent huge success of Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (九龍城寨之圍城, 2024).
If at first glance attempting to cover the entire history of the Hong Kong crime film would seem like a Herculean, if not impossible, task, Van den Troost explains that an assessment of the various sub-genres within crime film provides fuller access to the ever moving, clashing, developing and mutually influencing “generic landscape” (4). If different sub-genres, clusters, and cycles within crime film, such as the gangster movie or police thriller, can offer starkly different sketches of the socio-political environment of Hong Kong, then a holistic approach, rather than analyses of isolated films, can help fill in a larger canvas of the relationship between society and crime film. Such a comprehensive scope also allows Van den Troost to organize some of his discussions around the concept of “criminal realism,” which relates to the way filmmakers and censors were engaged in a constant push-and-pull tussle concerning how Hong Kong and local social reality can be depicted in cinema. Part of the originality of this book is the way it traces how heavy policing of both the city itself and its attendant filmic imageries in the 1950s and 1960s gave way to a rise in location shooting in the 1970s that shed away some of the artifice of earlier films and allowed Hong Kong to become a more multifaceted and pluralistic society in film. This exploration of criminal realism takes on extra urgency in today’s fraught political milieu with the enactment of the National Security Law and the tightening of film censorship. One could view Johnnie To’s 杜琪峯 superlative use of light and shadow in PTU (2003) as a visual metaphor for the ebbs and flows of criminal realism: dark corners kept from view suddenly light up the screen but always risk being submerged in darkness again.
The structure of the book is unusual, with an “Intermezzo” on film censorship coming in the middle that splits up the first half and second half. This split relates to developments in the film industry and censorship practices. The first half mainly focuses on films that could be placed within the social realist melodrama or lunlipian 倫理片 (ethics film), the pulp fiction action-adventure, detective films, and suspense thrillers made from the 1940s to 1960s. These films could adopt critical or oppositional stances toward the status quo, but Van den Troost explains how they did this subtly to bypass strict colonial censorship during this emergent period. The crime films of the 1970s, meanwhile, became increasingly realistic in the ways they depicted Hong Kong society and its urban spaces due to the loosened colonial censorship practices and their accompanying social causes that Van den Troost analyses in the intermezzo.
Chapters 1 and 2 contain many fascinating discussions of how filmmakers were using the crime genre to develop narratives involving clashes between tradition and modernity. Perhaps most enlightening for this reader is the excellent analysis, including visual analysis with a great utilization of screenshots, of how certain filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s, especially Lee Tit 李鐵, could present subtly critical depictions of the police and sympathetic depictions of criminals in certain crime films that constructs an ambiguous attitude toward the law (see pages 39 and 59 for examples). Such portrayals allowed filmmakers to point to the economic inequality at the heart of colonial capitalist rule as the root cause of crime. Such analysis revises common assumptions that Hong Kong films made in this era were completely depoliticized, showing instead that local filmmakers have long used the crime genre as a vehicle to explore tensions and (subtly) critique socio-political injustice in Hong Kong society. In turning to crime films made later in the 1960s and especially the 1970s, Van den Troost demonstrates how, with relaxed censorship policies, such critical perspectives could expand.
In exploring another important aspect of crime film—namely, action choreography—the author focuses on the subgenre of “unofficial justice fighter” film that mobilizes crime fighting vigilantes, Robin Hood-like heroes, secret agents, and undercover cops for social criticism or simply to stage exciting action. Strands from each of these subgenres sometimes converged in certain films, such as the Robin Hood-styled chivalrous thief films, as well as echo and be synthesized more strongly into later Hong Kong crime films of the 1970s. Such historical film analysis and research make strong connections between 1950s and 1960s filmmakers of the crime film genre and their better-known counterparts of the 1980s and post-1980s, such as Ringo Lam 林嶺東, John Woo 吳宇森, and Johnnie To. Chapters 1 and 2 also explore significant issues related to film industry production, such as media-mixing—whereby popular newspaper and magazine serials were adapted into books and then films, a formula that Kadokawa would famously perfect in the 1980s in Japan—and the dynamic relationships among auteur, studio, and genre in the larger filmmaking landscape.
Through in-depth archival research, the intermezzo chapter on film censorship provides a brilliant analysis of the shifting tides of colonial film censorship and their importance in the development of Hong Kong crime film. One of Van den Troost’s major interventions is his reorientation of existing scholarship on Hong Kong colonial film censorship. Most studies in this area have focused on how the Cold War environment, which in Hong Kong’s case specifically refers to the ongoing ideological war between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) throughout the 1950s and 1960s, shaped censorship policies. Van den Troost, however, argues that the colonial censors also anxiously policed depictions of social reality, including those of contemporary crime, well into the 1970s. In short, the colonial censors wanted cinema to project specific images of life in Hong Kong that did not match up to the lived reality of many people, and it was crime filmmakers who kept chipping away at this liberal image of the city to reveal its darker underbelly. This argument then highlights the way the colonial censors were not simply benign guardians trying to placate the KMT and CCP sides during the Cold War, but were active participants in determining what sort of images of Hong Kong could be viewed in cinema. Aspects that could lead to the banning or censorship of films included: critical or negative depictions of Hong Kong and the authorities; overly realistic accounts of criminal activities; sympathetic gangster figures; and/or police corruption. It is surprising that so little has been written about this aspect of Hong Kong colonial film censorship. Van den Troost’s argument, which is based on careful study of archival censorship records, expands the horizons for research on Hong Kong film censorship in this regard, and it is hard to disagree with his statement that this “more local facet of censorship” is arguably “vastly more important in shaping Hong Kong film production” than the context of international relations during the Cold War (13). It will be interesting to see how scholars will bridge these two approaches to Hong Kong film censorship, since there are undoubtedly important inter-connections between them.
The 1970s marked a watershed in colonial film censorship, which Van den Troost characterizes as a “liberal (de)colonisation” process. This was part of the Hong Kong government’s changing approach to how it governed the city, in attempts to legitimize itself by becoming more responsive to the public at large. Van den Troost points out that by the early 1970s, whereas the censors’ attitudes towards sex and violence in Hong Kong films had softened, they were harsher in restricting portrayals of contemporary crime. By the mid-1970s, this barrier too was largely dismantled, which led to major developments in the crime film genre and its popular ascent in the 1980s—a focus of the second half of the book. Particularly outstanding in this intermezzo is the way Van den Troost maps out the various agents, including film companies, distributors, cinema owners, cultural elites, and other figures and stakeholders, that put pressure on the colonial film censors to loosen their grip. Commercial considerations went hand in hand with the fight for freedom of expression: the global cinematic tides that brought ashore more sex and violence from abroad could not all be banned because it would be bad for business! This intermezzo on film censorship offers an eye-opening contribution to Hong Kong film studies and film censorship studies, especially in its illuminations of how and why colonial film censorship became less draconian throughout the 1970s, and to the effects of such changes on the development of Hong Kong crime film.
The next three chapters focus on developments in the crime film from 1969 to 1986. Van den Troost traces how the more realistic lunlipian and pulpier action adventures of the 1950s and 1960s explored in earlier chapters became more fully integrated by the 1970s, “with films pursuing an increasing degree of realism in depicting Hong Kong society and its urban spaces while also being unabashedly sensationalist and action driven” (113). This fascinating analysis shows us why it is important to trace this genre’s entire history and its assortment of subgenres, trends, and cycles, many of which have been under-examined in the scholarship. The development of any genre is indissociable from its context. The insights of chapter 4 into the relationship between realism in crime films of the 1970s and early 1980s and the formation of a distinctive Hong Kong identity help readers grasp how the genre was able to explore local issues and politics in a commercially viable way that the censors could also accept—a tactic employed by directors like Johnnie To, especially in his Election film series. The fact that Johnnie To cannot make Election 3 under the current censorship environment in Hong Kong demonstrates the relevance of such discussions to Hong Kong cinema today and adds poignancy to the book. Van den Troost explores these more recent developments in his afterword. His analysis in chapter 5 of local critics’ thoughts on Hong Kong crime films of the 1980s and their relationship with local social reality also stands out in terms of its reassessment of realism in Hong Kong cinema. As with the earlier chapters, the final three chapters also illuminate how different characterizations of cops and gangsters make comments on local politics and society; the sheer range of examples that Van Den Troost documents and analyses attests to the genre’s enduring popularity.
The concept of criminal realism threads through the book and weaves together multifaceted realities that could co-exist on-screen within the same film as well as in various sub-genres that refract facets of reality and perspectives on society. It often appears as though criminal realism is not necessarily connected to stylistic verisimilitude or to a particular aesthetic strategy but rather to a contextually perceived realism connected to slices of local social reality that could be based on lived experiences or drawn from newspaper headlines. This sort of realism often tended to appear in social problem films and to deal with topics such as violent crime and juvenile delinquency. The colonial censors desired to project largely liberal and positive images of the city, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, which is why such contextually perceived realism of local social reality, according to Van den Troost, became “criminal” in the eyes of the censors. Like the “banned film” label, this in turn tantalizes audiences to see more such criminal realism on screen, which in turn spurred more production and marketing. The question then becomes, what were some of the social realities that the authorities were trying to conceal from the screen? It would have helped if more contextual information about these social realities were included and analysed so we have a clearer picture of what precisely was missing from Hong Kong cinema, and how such absences transformed the concept of criminal realism. For instance, what were the causes for juvenile delinquency and violent crime, and how did they connect to the way the British colonial government structured and ran Hong Kong society? Although some of this context is mentioned, there is a slight tendency to rely on media reports or general histories of Hong Kong without exploring other more critical narratives about colonial governance. A minor point, but one that, if explored, would provide more context to the dynamic relation between crime films and film censorship.
Overall, Hong Kong Crime Films is a remarkable book, a model for the balance between archival research and formal film analysis necessary for understanding film genre and film history. It is this balancing act that generates the concept of criminal realism, which is useful for grasping the complex interplay between film censorship and realism in Hong Kong cinema. This concept can also be adapted and shed light on crime films made in other national film industry contexts. This book is a must-read for anybody interested in Hong Kong cinema, Hong Kong studies, colonial film censorship, and the crime film at large.
Tom Cunliffe
University College London