Government agencies communicate via. Trusted website s. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This history is a reflection of the way Singapore has transformed over the last 50 years as well as changing perceptions of Singapore in the West. It was a huge success and spawned several sequels. Singapore, as depicted by Buck, contrasted the untamed wilderness of the jungle with the colonial sophistication of the Raffles Hotel. The result was a compelling myth of tropical Asia that was eagerly consumed by American film audiences.
Still, 80 years later, we can view Samarang as a sublime documentary — the faces and behaviour of the extras, as well as the now forgotten landscapes indelibly captured on celluloid before they disappeared. In travelling to Asia as filmmakers, Wing and Buck were pioneers. Many of these early Hollywood films purportedly set in Singapore never came within sniffing distance of the island.
This fabricated Singapore was the perfect setting for Hollywood melodramas and thrillers concerning desperate souls set adrift in inhospitable foreign climes. From the s, as Singapore gained independence and modernised rapidly, foreign film crews became commonplace, their arrival coinciding with the decline of the local film industry. After all, international travel was as essential to the genre as gadgets, beautiful women and submachine guns. While Bangkok, Hong Kong and Tokyo were visited by himself, a motley crew of European filmmakers descended at then Paya Lebar Airport to shoot their versions of the Bond film.
The plot is ludicrous guff about atomic secrets echoed in all of these spy films , but it is beautifully filmed and almost entirely shot on location in Singapore and Johor including a delightful chase through kitschy Haw Par Villa in Pasir Panjang. This was followed by another Italian spy-flick, Goldsnake: Anonima Killers , drastically less stylish and amusing than So Darling So Deadly , although it affords rare glimpses of a s Orchard Road, among other locations in Singapore.
But the worst was yet to come. In late , a Hong Kong-based American photographer and newsreel cameraman, Marvin Farkas, raised just enough money to make a spy thriller in Singapore. The premise for the film came from two Singapore-based war correspondents, Keith Lorenz and Ian Ward, who had aspirations to write a movie that captured an explosive moment in Southeast Asia Vietnam and Indonesia were blowing up — literally; President Suharto had just come into power in Indonesia, and Vietnam was in the thick of a bloody war between the north and south.
