Movies in Malaysia

On Wednesday, the U.S. Ambassador to Malaysia had a dinner for all the U.S. Fulbrighters here. It was a very enjoyable group for conversation. One of the topics was VCDs and the pirate video business.

I am trying to buy only legal VCDs, but the ambassador told me that even though I buy them in a regular shop (not at a street stall, and not from a boy who walks up to you at a restaurant and offers you a fat binder full of VCD covers from which to choose), and even though they have all kinds of holographic stickers and seals attached, my VCDs may still be pirate copies. So he advised me not to take them home, although the worst that would happen to me is probably that U.S. Customs would confiscate them.

Ever since I saw the movie Sepet (which just came out on VCD), I have been learning more about the movie business in Malaysia. The short version is "Malay movies used to be great. P. Ramlee." That is, back in the 1950s and '60s, a Malay actor-director-musician named P. Ramlee made a ton of movies that people here still talk about. I have seen two or three of them on TV. They have English subtitles. And they ARE good.

In my digging around for information about Malaysian movies, I discovered one of the best Malaysian Web sites (in English) I've seen yet, Windows to Malaysia, and their Brief History of Film in Malaysia. (The home page for Windows to Malaysia is actually terrible, but the interior pages are excellent. The content is clearly backed by the government, but you can fill in the obvious gaps elsewhere.)

The other key to the story of "What happened to Malay movies?" (as one character in Sepet asks another) -- apart from P. Ramlee (who died in 1973) -- is the Shaw Brothers. Yes, Run Run and Run Me Shaw, much more famous today for their Hong Kong movie studio, from which came many great kung fu movies in the 1960s and '70s. The Shaw Brothers got their start in Shanghai but soon moved to Singapore, and their studio there, Malay Film Productions, produced the best of the famous P. Ramlee movies. They had a sweet setup like the Hollywood studios, with their own movie theaters (typically called cinema halls here) that showed only their movies. When the sweet deal went sour (similar to the demise of the studio system in Hollywood), the Shaw Brothers packed up and moved to Hong Kong. After 1964, P. Ramlee continued to make movies at Studio Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, but the consensus seems to be that his films for the Shaw Brothers were his best.

Anyway, what's fascinating to a foreigner like me about those P. Ramlee movies is that you see people living what appears to be a kind of typical 1950s Malay daily life. That life is different in many ways today, and yet some things stay the same. One of the things that always strikes me is the men wearing sarongs. I see them any day in the mini-market or anywhere else in Shah Alam -- especially older men. (Not a lot of men, just one or two on a typical day.) On Fridays, there are more than usual, because it's good to wear sarong to the mosque on Friday. In the P. Ramlee movies, lots of men are wearing sarong. And they're out in the kampungs (villages), hanging out on the veranda, talking ... this is the village life that's slowly going away here, from what I understand, for the usual reasons: TV, Western influences, education, modernization, development. Anyway, I think the P. Ramlee movies are something like Frank Capra movies, maybe too good to be true in some ways, and yet certainly there is truth in them, and we (they) like to think that's how we (they) were back then.