In his movie The Hole , Tsai Ming Liang, pays tribute to Hong Kong 60’s musicals which enchanted his youth. Ballet scenes recalling the Golden Age appear in the grimey appartment where the movie takes place: the couple Yang Kuei-mei and Lee Kang-sheung flanked by chorus girls improvise dance routines to chinese mambos sung by Grace Chang or Bai Guang. Inspired by this allusion to the mambo craze we asked Paul Fonoroff for his personal recount.

By Paul Fonoroff published in tofu#2

My life was changed by Mambo Girl. I first began watching Hong Kong movies back in the 1970s when, as a student in Singapore, I lived near a Shaw Brothers cinema. Later, in Taiwan, I went to the movies almost every day. But the 1970s was an era of kung-fu and insipid romances, neither of which were much to my liking. Then, one day in Hong Kong in 1979, I switched on the television, and there was a black-and-white musical that had me mesmerized. Two perky young adults, Grace Chang and Peter Chan Hos, were doing the cha-cha in a high schoolgymnasium. The movie was the 1957 classic, Mambo Girl. Like a thunderbolt,the picture instantly changed my perception of Hong Kong cinema by giving me an inkling that Hong Kong cinema had a history beyond kung-fu. I was hooked.

Of course, I had no idea about the identity of the stars of Mambo Girl or the studio that produced it, household names to anyone raised in Hong Kong,Taiwan, or Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. Mandarin-dialect cinema was then separated into two camps, pro-PRC and pro-ROC. On the left side of the political spectrum was Great Wall and Feng Huang. The right side was dominated by Shaw Brothers and MP&GI. (*an amalgam meaning Motion Picture & General Investment, a branch of the Cathay Organisation; in the early 1960s the studio was reorganized and redubbed Cathay).

Unlike old Hollywood classics, which are constantly aired on television, these Mandarin movies are rarelyallowed out of the can. Movie buffs born after 1970 have had virtually no exposure to the Cathay or Shaws product.But there have been some respites.

Twenty years ago, the MP&GI/Cathay films were shown nightly on TVB-Jade,Hong Kong’s most popular television station. Night after night, I watched approximately 70 of these Mandarin movies, and became an MP&GI fan. Some pictures, like Our Sister Hedy and Wild Wild Rose, are excellent; many are merely average. But Mambo Girl holds a special place in my heart. It is MP&GI all the way, starting with its star, Grace Chang, the Mambo Girl herself.

Grace had been in many movies before Mambo Girl, but this is the one that established her superstardom. The sight of her in harlequin pants, dancing the mambo and introducing such hit songs as I Love Cha Cha, it ís no wonder she left such an indelible impression on Chinese youth. Her energy and enthusiasm (she was 22 at the time) are irrepressible, the voice unmistakable.

The movie's pace may lag at times, the script is sometimes impossibly melodramatic, but Grace shines, the personification of East- Meets -West joie de vivre. And there are added benefits, including guest cameo appearances by Mona Fong, the future Mrs. Run Run Shaw, and Ollie Delfino, father of singing star Alex To.

The success of Mambo Girl led to a spate of youth musicals, by both MP&GI and Shaws. Calendar Girl released in 1959, was one of the first color extravaganzas, with a story more hackneyed than Mambo Girl but with eye-catching sets and two of Mandarin movies's most voluptuous stars, Helen Li Mei and Diana Chang Chung-wen, as compensation.