The Black Hand Gang
Che Mamat Parang Tumpol
Lakshmana Krishnan
Singapore – 1960
Screenplay: Pelham Groom
Cinematography: Nan Kai Juan
Production: Cathay-Keris Films
Language: Malay, Hokkien
Duration: 95 min
Color: Black and White
Rights / Thanks to Che Mamat Parang Tumpol, now preserved by the Asian Film Archive, is one of the 91 surviving Cathay-Keris Malay Classics film titles made in Singapore between the 1950s and early 1970s. In 2014, the collection was inscribed onto the UNESCO Memory of the World Asia-Pacific Register, a list of endangered library and archive holdings. Thanks to the Asian Film Archive for providing access to their Cathay-Keris Malay Classics Collection, and to Cathay-Keris Films for their support of the screening.
Synopsis: Che Mamat is a clumsy but charming daydreamer from the coast. While his nagging mother finds him hopeless, his girlfriend Fatimah encourages him to enter a story-writing competition organized by the newspaper Berita Singapura. As chance would have it, Mamat wins the top prize and lands a job as an investigative journalist. His first assignment is to track down the infamous Black Hand Gang, a criminal organization suspected of exhorting shop-owners into buying their beer and leaving their gang sign—a black handprint—wherever they go as a warning. When the police also join in Mamat’s investigation, handprints suddenly begin appearing all over the place. Wild pursuits and hilarity ensue as a singing Mamat rides his lambretta in pursuit of the triads.
Notes:
The Black Hand Gang won the Best Comedy Award at the 8th Asian Film Festival in 1961. The film offered a glimpse of the rural and urban landscapes of late 1950s Singapore, a former colonial outpost quickly emerging as an autonomous, modern state. As a testament to progress, the title character Che Mamat rides and sings a song about his lambretta scooter, already ubiquitous on Indian roads of the 1950s and destined to overtake Malasia by the end of the 1960s. Indian popular culture enjoyed a warm reception with Malay audiences, “who adored the songs and dances and recognized the obvious similarities to locally made films, even though these films were neither subtitled nor dubbed into the Malay language” comments film historian William van der Heide following an interview with Lakshmana Krishnan, who was one of several promising Indian directors recruited by the Malay film industry in the 50s.
Krishnan, a native of Madras, India, was educated in Penang and began his career as a film director at the local branch of Shaw Studios. Throughout his career he joined and co-founded a number of production studios and worked on over 30 films with some of the major local film talent including Latifah Omar and Wahid Satay. A common thread throughout the early careers of Malaysian film professionals in the 1950s and early 60s was an ongoing series of legal disputes over talent and distribution, emblematic of the struggle to establish an autonomous local cinema free from the oligopolistic control of transnational corporations. S. Roomai Noor, sometimes mentioned as the uncredited director of The Black Hand Gang, was banned from working in the film industry for three years following a court order obtained by the Shaw Brothers for his participation in the founding of the Cathay Films production company.
The star of The Black Hand Gang, Wahid Satay, was also closely associated with Cathay-Keris Studios, where he began his career as a set artist before his talent for comedy was recognized by director B. Narayan Rao. Wahid (full name Abdul Wahid bin Haji Ahmad) was given the role of a comic satay vendor in the film Pontianak (1957), a character that brought audiences to laughter and tears, earning him the nickname ‘Wahid Satay.’ His performance contributed to the unprecedented success of the film, which in 1957 broke all Malay film theatre box office records to date with earnings of over one million dollars, the highest amount collected so far.