Hong Kong Crime Films

Examines the history of the Hong Kong crime film before 1986

• Departs from the predominant focus on action aesthetics in studies of Hong Kong cinema to focus on the early crime film’s close links to local society and politics
• Draws on years of research on censorship and the crime film in archives in Hong Kong and in the United Kingdom
• Provides ample evidence of the often-overlooked role film censorship played in shaping Hong Kong genre cinema
• Connects the appearance of the modern crime film in the late 1960s and 1970s to the growing consciousness of a distinctive Hong Kong identity

Hong Kong Crime Films is the first book detailing the post-war history of the genre before the release of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), the film that put Hong Kong action-crime on the global map. Focusing on what it calls the mode of ‘criminal realism’ in the crime film, the book shows how depictions of Hong Kong’s social reality (including crime) were for decades anxiously policed by colonial censors, and how crime films tended (and still tend) to confound and transgress critical definitions of realism.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Hong Kong Crime Films covers several neglected topics in the study of Hong Kong cinema, such as the evolving generic landscape of the crime film prior to the 1980s, the influence of colonial film censorship on the genre, and the prominence and contestation of realism" in the local history of the crime film.