A Singapore Story, Hollywood Version

Abstract

The fourth chapter 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 States 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 chapter 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 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 chapter aims to remedy this absence.