Thursday, July 5, 2012

Sunset - Paul Chin Pei (1971) - Lung Ha Wan, Sai Kung

One of the more iconic locations from the film because its seen at the very end when Paul goes to the seaside to watch the sunset. Lung Ha Wan aka Lobster Bay has two sides to it on either side of a small headland. The northern beach is a popular shore diving spot for local scuba enthusiasts and was for a long time an area where stolen luxury cars were loaded into modified speedboats and smuggled over the border to China. A concrete ramp that aided the loading of these cars was eventually blown up by British Army engineers and the fragments of it still litter the beach.

The southern side of the headland has a direct view down the coast towards Trio Rock, which can be seen amongst others on the following screen grab (in fact the larger island directly above his head in the first shot).


Now, I can't say for certain whether the shot looking back towards Paul was filmed at the same location, it certainly could've been but it's not possible to say for sure without going there myself and looking for the same rocks (which I'm not going to do any time soon).


Anyway, there is a very similar angle to this found on Panoramio courtesy of kc22jordan.

4 comments:

YTSL said...

Hi Phil --

Another Hong Kong movie in which Ha Lung Wan prominently figures is Alex Cheung's "Cops and Robbers" (1979) which screened as part of the Teddy Robin Kwan Panorama at the Grand Cinema earlier this year.

Incidentally, I've been to Ha Lung Wan -- but I got there after a fairly traumatic hike which involved getting down neighboring Tai Leng Tun as quickly as possible due to my hiking companion and I having encountered scary wild dogs midway up the hill, so can't remember too much about the place. ;(

Phil said...

Hi Yvonne

Actually it's Lung Ha, not Ha Lung. A Lung Ha is a "dragon crab" in Cantonese i.e. a Lobster. It's a nice little bay but actually in the film the shot is a bit odd and it looks as though they merged two shots together to miss out a large amount of sea between the rocks and the bay. In reality it's quite a distance.

Sorry to hear about the dogs, your fears are well founded as I know someone who was attacked by a pack of them whilst hiking (in Lantau I think?) and ended up in hospital getting a round of rabies jabs. It's one of the many things that lets HK down, I feel.

Cheers
Phil

YTSL said...

Hi Phil --

Oops re the Lung Ha... don't know what I was thinking! And yep, I do know it means lobster (and, actually, it's dragon prawn, right?).

Re the wild dogs: one of them was clearly a new mother, so we worried that we'd accidentally come across her pups and then she would really want to attack us. On my hikes, I've sometimes come across one dog and that's not so scary. But this was a case where we had dogs behind us as well as dogs in front of us... and that really did not feel good!

Phil said...

of course prawn not crab, that's me having a brain fart as well. Between us we get there in the end.

Many times I've had to turn around from an intended walk because there has been a large Rottweiler standing between me and my destination. I used to love dogs but have been really put off them since moving to HK, there's just too many people who either neglect them completely (in villages) and turn them feral or treat them like little children and walk them around in doggy carts (seems to be most prevalent in Sai Kung). As a result I always have to suppress an urge to give people a slap :-)

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