View a clip from the film.

The only one of the eight revolutionary theatre works (bage yangbanxi) set in contemporary China. It is about the ideological backsliding of the docker worker…., his temptation by a man eventually uncovered as a class enemy, and re-education by an old worker and the saintly party secretary Fang Haizhen.

Originally staged at the modern theatre festival in Beijing in 1964, it took years of rewriting and a repeated application of Mao Zedong’s dictum “never to forget class struggle” for “On the Docks” to make it to the Cultural Revolution stage and to be filmed. The screen version was realized by the irrepressible party artistic hack Xie Jin (who also directed many major pre- and post-Cultural Revolution propaganda pieces).