IN THE BEGINNING  were Ho Ah Loke and Runme Shaw, doggedly touring the kampongs with their little lorry and projector, churning out flickering black and white movies that introduced Charlie Chaplin and Tarzan to the country folk. They were to grow into mighty tycoons of the cinema, making Malay motion pictures and showing them in their own cinema chains. But you will get nothing of this in this book with a misleading title which is, in truth, the story of a man who in 1948, some 20 years later,  became one of the managers of the Cathay cinema organisation owned by one of the Loke Yew family, the millionaire Loke Wan Tho. It is not a great story but it is an honest account of one man’s business life in the various towns he was posted to.

Those were the days when, with the return of the British,  you had to once again stand to attention when  the National Anthem was played, when the premature  opening of cinema doors betrayed signs of treason.  Wong Kee Hung’s first posting was to Batu Pahat in charge of a cinema, a converted godown that seated 300 people.  His salary was $200 a month.  His accommodation, a rented room where he slept on his own camp bed and protected himself from the mosquitoes with his own mosquito net. After that it was Malacca where “Tears of the Yangtse” -  about the Japanese occupation - proved to be popular.  Then to Singapore to manage the Alhambra and the Malborough where he presented the Casbah, Dick Tracy,  Fu Manchu, Flash Gordon and Undersea Kingdom. Then to Kuching with the grand salary of $375 but housed in a store room “stacked with baskets bulging with glass and earthenware”. In Kuching he manages the Sylvia, seating 450,  and the Lilian, 750. He is next posted to Jesselton.

When he is recalled to Singapore to be Deputy Manager of International Films  after Loke Wan Tho’s death in an aeroplane disaster, Wong Kee Hung was a mature man with management skills, whose diplomacy and courage avoided clashes with gangsters and difficult rich people at the box office.

His memoirs are modest but are reliable records of his time. He tells us little of the films that were shown though he remembers the first talkie as  Sunny Side Up with its unforgettable song, “If I had a talking picture of you”; Bathing Beauty with Red Skelton and the swimming champ Esther Williams. Nor does he tell us of the partnership with Ho Ah Loke to compete with Shaw and he is not interested at all in the film making side dominated by Shaw and Ho Ah Loke. But there is a dearth of books about this country and this modest volume usefully fills gaps in incomplete picture we have of the past.#