Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The World of Suzie Wong - William Holden (1960) - Statue Square, Hong Kong

Actually, this area was and still is dissected by Chater Road and the part featured below is really the area next to the Cenotaph (though we don't see this on film), I've used Statue Square in the title because it's perhaps more familiar and we still get to some see the buildings that encircle(d) it anyway.

Well, immediately after crossing Connaught Road from Edinburgh Place, Holden (as Robert Lomax) walks to ask directions to the Nam Kok Hotel. Unfortunately the filmmakers at this point thought it would be more interesting to have a rickshaw blocking the foreground whilst the fantastic old Queen's and Prince's buildings get largely obscured in the background and as such we get only glimpses of how impressive these buildings were.


Queen's Building was of course replaced by the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in 1963, not long after this film was made (the COOKS sign above can be spotted on almost any old photo of the place) and the Prince's Building still exists - albeit in name only.


Interestingly, on this last shot above we can see the former versions of both the Standard Chartered Bank Building (then just known as "The Chartered Bank") and part of the previous (and much more pleasing to me) HSBC building.

2 comments:

Daniel Thomas said...

Such a shame these went...

Phil said...

agreed. they were some great looking buildings :-(

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