[Malaya Black & White] Hawaii Five-O [The Year of the Horse]

Date: Thursday, September 3, 2015

Time: 7.00pm 

Venue: Ngee Ann Kongsi Auditorium @ NUS University Town

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It was the summer of 1978 and the biggest TV show in the world was in Singapore shooting not one but two episodes! Meanwhile, elsewhere on the island, Peter Bogdanovich was secretly making a film, happy in the knowledge that with Jack Lord on the cover of The Straits Times every day, no one would care what he was doing. The Year of the Horse is the shadow production to Saint Jack, filmed at the same time, and sharing some of the same actors (George Lazenby and Osman Jailani), it was directed by Don Weis, a capable TV veteran known for The Adventures of Haji Baba, and features a Ministry of Culture approved story about drug smugglers operating out of the Lion City. Eventually shown as a ‘feature length’ closer to Season Eleven of the series, the material has been beautifully preserved, so this is a nostalgic treat for location-spotters.

This screening is part of the 'Beyond Saint Jack' segment under the NUS Museum's Malaya Black & White film series.

About ‘Beyond Saint Jack’ - The strange cinematic visitors of Singapore and Malaya
Singapore/Malaya’s heyday of foreign production from the mid 1960s to the early 1980s led to a motley filmography of B-movies, commercial disasters, miscellaneous TV episodes, lost films and bizarre curios. While they resist canonisation, these films are a fascinating portal into how the region was perceived by the rest of the world both before and after the end of the colonial era; and the eagerness for Singapore and Malaysia to be represented and acknowledged by the West. A recurring motif of their narratives is the Western visitor in Singapore. This season of 10 films showcases the predecessors and descendants of Saint Jack (1979): old hands, good men, legal aliens, rugged individualists, ex-soldiers, detectives, has-beens and rock stars. Characters who have found themselves ensnared in traps beyond their control, stumbled across exotic, bewildering cultures, or entered zones of erotic possibility.

Beyond Saint Jack is guest-curated by author and critic Ben Slater, who will be present to introduce and discuss each film.

About Ben Slater
Ben Slater is the author of Kinda Hot: The Making of Saint Jack in Singapore (2006), a major contributor to World Film Locations: Singapore(2014) and the editor of 25: Histories and Memories of the Singapore International Film Festival (2014). He’s also the co-screenwriter of the feature film Camera (2014) and a Lecturer at the School of Art, Media and Design, Nanyang Technological University.

To find out more about the Malaya Black & White project, please go to https://malayablackandwhite.wordpress.com/