The Knife, which was released to Malayan cinemas in November 1952, promoted a government reward scheme which offered substantial cash rewards in return for the capture of ‘Communist terrorists’. The use of rewards for information had been adopted in earlier imperial campaigns – for example the Boer War – and ‘passed through three distinct phases’ in Malaya (Ramakrishna, War In History, 334). The first followed the arrival of Hugh Carleton Greene (later Director General of the BBC) in Malaya in September 1950, who set up and headed the Emergency Information Services. Greene proposed that the only emotion ‘stronger than fear among a terrorised population with very little civic consciousness is greed’. Thus, in December 1950, he secured large increases in the ‘scale of rewards for information leading to the capture or killing of terrorists’. In the first half of 1951, the Government paid out $500,000 under this scheme and by June 1952, almost $2 million had been paid out in rewards (Ramakrishna, 2002, 116-117, Straits Times, 24 June 1952, 4).

The arrival of Sir Gerald Templer as the new High Commissioner General in February 1952 saw a further increase in rewards, as Templer used the reward scheme to target the leading figures of the Malayan Communist Party. For example, the reward for information or action leading to the capture of Chin Peng was raised from $80,000 to $250,000 (and $125,000 if he was brought in dead). However, in January 1953, the reward scheme was revised once again. Amidst concern that the high, publicly promoted rewards were actually serving to enhance the prestige of those terrorists who evaded capture, establishing them as figures of ‘hero worship’, Templer quietly reduced, and stopped publicising, the amounts on offer (Ramakrishna, 2002, 156-157).

Regardless of its effectiveness, the reward scheme was the subject of much criticism during the Emergency. Soldiers complained that ‘terrorists who were caught were treated like murderers, while those who surrendered were “treated like Kings”’, while others questioned the morality of a system that not only allowed terrorists to walk out of the jungle and return to society, but actually rewarded such behaviour. Historian Kumar Ramakrishna argued that ‘while dubious at one level, [the use of rewards] was certainly less problematic than other strategies used to bring wars to an end’, particularly as such a policy was motivated by a desire to reach a resolution as soon as possible (Ramakrishna, War in History, 352).

The Knife was presented to the press at a screening in Kuala Lumpur in November 1952. The recently appointed head of the Government Films Division, Tom Hodge, explained that the Malayan Film Unit had been reorganised and ‘efforts had been specially directed towards producing film in English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil’ (as The Knife was). He also noted that the system of distribution was being overhauled, but despite these apparent changes, The Straits Timesstrongly criticised the Unit’s output after a further press screening in December. The only picture ‘with an ounce of inspiration behind it’, the writer argued, was The Knife, ‘which was shown to the general public in Singapore two or three weeks ago, anyway!’ (Straits Times, 27 November 1952, 5, and 7 December 1952, 13).

The Knife may even have been released slightly earlier under another title. A film entitled “Tuah Bermatong Kerpada Chapat (‘It Pays to be Quick on the Draw’) was entered into the Edinburgh Festival in 1952. In describing the film, The Straits Times said that it ‘tells the tale of two Malays who are captured by the bandits while pidgeon [sic] hunting and who eventually turn the tables on them with the aid of the Gurkhas’ (Straits Times, 27 July 1952, 3). This film, along with My New Home and From Darkness into Light (also known as ‘The Way Out’), which addressed, respectively, Chinese resettlement and bandit surrender, were directed by O.W. Kheng Law, who would later replace Hodge as the head of the MFU (Straits Times, 27 January 1952, 9). Kheng Law was one of 30 Chinese within the MFU in 1953, working alongside 70 Malays, 22 Indians, 9 Eurasians and 4 Europeans (Catalogue of Films, 1953, 13).