A Night in Hong Kong Film Review

Aka - Honkon no yoru

This gloriously looking film is shot in Tohoscope in brilliant colors and is a co-production between Toho and Cathay studio. It is as much a travelogue as it is a melodrama and romance. A lot of that feels like old hat now but it is a pleasure having the film go back and forth between Hong Kong, Tokyo and Macao. The film is clearly inspired by Love is a Many Splendored Thing and even the music echo's that famous theme. It stars Japanese actor Akira Takarada who was a big star by this time for Toho - for many films but especially remembered now for Godzilla and many future Kaiju films. He must have been popular in Hong Kong because he was to star in a few Toho - Cathay productions - Star of Hong Kong, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Hawaii, The Longest Night and The White Rose of Hong Kong. The director of this one - Chiba Yasuki - was the director of two of those others. He was a big director with over 100 director credits in Japan going back to 1930. This is beautifully shot and well-acted. At two-hours it dawdles for too long, but it looked so good I didn't mind.

Tanaka (Takarada) is a journalist who travels the world for stories. On his way back from Africa, he stops off in Hong Kong for 48-hours. That is all the time he needs to fall in love and who can blame him. He goes out with a friend to a nightclub where the dancers are listed with the languages they speak. He begins to dance but is soon felled with the flu. The dancer tells him to come to her home along with the friend because there is a doctor living in the same building. He gets under the covers and the doctor shows up. A practitioner of Chinese medicine. He looks up. So do I. Holy shit. It is Lucilla Yu Ming, one of the biggest Hong Kong actresses at the time for Cathay. Winner of a few Best Actress Awards. She is stunning. He falls for her like brick off a high rise. But of course, there are complications.

She is half Chinese and half Japanese and her Japanese mother deserted her and her father years before. She hates her. And refuses to get involved with a Japanese man. Tanaka returns to Tokyo a beaten man. But a woman named Keiko there is in love with him and goes after him like a heat seeking missile. She is played by Yôko Tsukasa who appeared in films from Ozu, Naruse and Kurosawa during her career. Not a bad fallback but he is in love with that girl from Hong Kong. Keiko has a little bubby buddy and she looked familiar - ah Mie Hama at her cutest. This is what melodrama is made of - he is in love with a woman who won't return it and another woman is in love with him. No villains in this film. At one point he chases her to Macao and we get to see that lovely town back before it was overrun by casinos. For me, this was a real treat. Would love someday to find those other films I mentioned. Lucilla who has dialogue here in Mandarin, Japanese and English was in two of them. I had forgotten how much I like her.