A Man Without a Country: British Imperial Nostalgia in Ferry to Hong Kong (1959)

On New Year’s Eve 1959, Ferry to Hong Kong was screened at the Lee Theatre and the Astor in Hong Kong. Produced by Rank as its first CinemaScope feature, the big-budget movie tells the real-life tale of Steven Ragan, a stateless drifter who was stuck for ten months on the ferry sailing between Hong Kong and Macau. Ragan’s (aka Michael Patrick O’Brien) unusual experiences were keenly reported by the international press in 1952–53 and fictionalized by Simon Kent (Max Catto) in Ferry to Hongkong (1957). First, Ferry to Hong Kong could be seen as an ‘anxious cinema’ (Sue Harper, Vincent Porter) eager to reestablish British national assurance on Asian Cold War fronts, following the 1956 Suez Canal debacle that witnessed the passing of Britain’s empire might and international influence at the hands of the Eisenhower administration. The film conveyed sentiments of imperial nostalgia and loss by portraying a stateless subject, a descendant of the doomed Austrian and British empires. The director Lewis Gilbert later made The 7th Dawn (1964) about the retreat of British colonial forces from Malaya after WWII, another collaborative production starring William Holden as an American major. Second, Orson Welles called Hong Kong ‘the new Third Man territory,’ pompously referring to The Third Man (1949), a British film with his star persona that captured the paranoia and vulnerability of Vienna during the four-power occupation of Austria (1945–1955). This comparison unwittingly reveals British fears about the precariousness of Hong Kong in resisting the infiltrations of Communist China. More than the adventure of the vagabond Ferry to Hong Kong was an espionage thriller in uneasy disguise. The film precisely preceded Gilbert’s three James Bond films that affirmed the power of the individual in cracking trans-boundary networks of espionage and political intrigue.