From 1949 to 1978, one of the most persistent mass obsessions in China was "catching spies." There were said to be agents everywhere, usually tied to the United States, Japan, or Taiwan, and once caught they could be paraded in public, denounced, reeducated—the repertoire was extensive. Out of that atmosphere came a distinctly Chinese film type: the anti-espionage movie.
There is nothing especially mysterious about the genre in formal terms. It is basically a variation on the cops-and-robbers picture. Replace “special agent” with “spy,” and it also fits neatly into the espionage-thriller category. Whether the Soviet Union or Vietnam made their own equivalents is another question, and not one worth answering too confidently.
These films kept appearing, on and off, all the way into the 1990s, with quality varying wildly. Black Triangle is one of the two that stayed most vividly in my memory. It was made in 1977, after the Cultural Revolution but before the Third Plenary Session of the 12th Central Committee, so when it was rerun constantly in the 1980s it did not yet feel like some ancient relic.
For a movie about hunting enemy agents, it is not especially violent or bloody. Compared with martial-arts staples like Shaolin Temple or The South Shaolin Master, it is downright gentle. That probably helped make it a regular holiday rerun.
The title image is simple enough: the black triangle stands against the red five-pointed star, an unmistakable symbol of evil. Whenever three black triangles appear in sequence, the spies are exchanging signals. That gimmick is memorable, but it also points to one of the film’s biggest weaknesses: the enemy network seems to have poured all of its talent into coded rendezvous. In every other respect—combat ability, concealment, improvisation—they are absurdly feeble.
One message indicates that the meeting point is the “Dihuang Palace.” Fair enough, that is at least somewhat concealed. But after finally making contact, what gets passed along is just a plainly written note on a small scrap of paper. So much for spycraft.
By the time the film was made, relations with the United States had already shifted and ties with Japan had also improved. That meant the handlers behind the spy ring had to be Soviet. That is probably also why both the setting and the filming location are Harbin.
The female villain is played by Ling Yuan, cast as an old operative who has spent twenty years selling popsicles by the river. Ling Yuan built an entire career playing kind, grandmotherly women. This was the one major villain role people really remember her for, and she made it stick.
To put it plainly: in the 1980s, those popsicle boxes were still common enough to see everywhere, but they were rarely tended by elderly women. If there had been an old lady selling from one, children probably would have kept their distance.
The heroine, played by Liu Jia, became famous nationwide because of this film. There was even a line going around that the ticket cost fifteen cents, and Liu Jia alone was worth fourteen of them. It is not hard to see why. She is stunning from every angle. The only odd part is that her face looks too mature for the character’s supposed age of seventeen.
Years later, when Liu Jia was around forty, she played Ren Changxia and found another major career peak. Several actresses later marketed as “Little Liu Jia” were never really in the same league.
There is one crying scene of hers, though, that feels like the film’s biggest misstep. This is the moment when the organization reveals the truth about her background. The problem is not the acting; it is the writing. Even if her adoptive mother is a spy, that woman still raised her for over twenty years. Two people from “the organization” say a few words, produce a photo from when she was two years old, and she instantly accepts the whole story? What if the people approaching her were the real spies?
Of course, the audience already knows they are not. One of them is the male lead, a familiar face to anyone who remembers him.
At the beginning, the heroine herself is under suspicion, and while the police investigate, the film takes the opportunity to show off a bit of socialist everyday happiness. She works as a piano teacher at the workers’ cultural palace. Her first appearance is in a solo performance. At one point she even brushes past the investigation team while taking children to swim by the river.
Late-1970s swimwear, for the record, was quite something. Some people have only heard about it. I have actually seen it.
The funniest stretch comes after Ling Yuan’s identity is exposed and the film flashes back twenty years to inform us that she was once “a flower of old Shanghai.” A flower like that? She was already around sixty at the time of filming. And unlike someone such as Liu Xiaoqing, who could somehow keep playing younger women indefinitely, Ling Yuan had long since settled fully into elderly roles.
The era also left the movie with plenty of dead air. There are those classic filler shots where, if the drama is thin, someone can always smoke on camera. There are vague senior leaders sitting around and commanding things for no clear reason. There is the Soviet contact, presented with an air of great mystery that never really amounts to much.
And then there is the shot of the cultural palace students walking down the stairs—a scene so stiffly arranged it might as well have “posed for the camera” written across every face.
Still, the first half works. The investigation, the suspicion, the back-and-forth of deduction and maneuvering—that part is genuinely engaging. Once the film shifts into the capture phase, though, it starts to drag, and the energy goes out of it.
What remains strongest in memory is a single image: the old female spy hiding behind a door.
