Shanghai noir emerged in the immediate post-war years as a response to Hollywood imports. China's war against Japan (1937–45) had scarcely ended in August 1945 when its people faced another kind of ‘invasion’ from movies of the USA. Having been deprived of Hollywood pictures during wartime, China's filmgoers embraced American imports while local filmmakers looked on with envy and anxiety. From 1946 to 1949, hundreds of American releases flourished on Chinese screens, among them war, espionage, musicals, romantic love and crime pictures the most popular genres. Chinese cinema, including that of Hong Kong, fought back by producing genre films of similar and mixed conventions. The latter combined melodramas, musicals and comedies with darker elements of murder, crime, suicide, horror and psychological dissociation. In no other comparable period were audiences of Chinese cinema so drawn to the dark side of human nature.

Some of these productions can now be identified wholly or partly under the description of film noir, or what is called ‘heise dianying’ (dark film) in Chinese. As we know, the term itself is never singly or homogeneously defined, and it is not my intention to differentiate these films as a genre but rather as a ‘feeling’ and ‘tone’. In this chapter I examine the dark elements and pessimistic tone in post-war Chinese cinema and its extension from Shanghai to Hong Kong involving key directors, actresses and films, along with specific cinema and social contexts.

Right after the war ended, the nationalist government took over the film industry in Shanghai, Peking and Manchuria, centralising film production and distribution under state control. The move was to disallow Chinese communists from using film for ideological propagation. In Nanking, the state-owned China Productions and two small studios were given support to produce nationalist propaganda and educational films; in Peking and Shanghai, China Film Studio was reorganised to become the biggest state-owned studios producing commercial films and newsreels. These studios were well equipped with facilities taken over from the Japanese occupiers and gave their employees regular salaries at a time of economic depression.