Look carefully in the background and you can just make out the film being shown at the cinema is John Goldfarb, Please Come Home. I don't know when the film was released in Hong Kong but it certainly was first released in the US in 1965, which tallies with what we know about when this show was made. But which cinema was it?
In this case the blue stripes on the building provide a bit of a clue to its identity. It was a cinema called the Sands Theatre in TST, specifically on the NW corner of the junction between Peking Road and Hankow Road. The boys have just crossed the southern part of Hankow Road and Peking Road is the one going across screen behind them on the upper shot.
According to Cinema Treasures, the Sands first opened in 1963, so it was a fairly new venue at this time, and closed in 1980. The theatre was demolished and a new building put up on the site which during my first few years in HK contained an HMV. The HMV has since moved on (twice!!) and the shop now has a large Adidas store there. See below. The angle on Streetview is a fairly good match to the original.
AP provided a nicely put together stitch of the two shots to give us a wide angle view of the same scene.
There's also a nice picture of it on FLICKR but looking down the road from Peking Road here.
2 comments:
I love your blog and the comparsion picture. You haven't got FERRY TO HONG KONG (1959), RED DRAGON (1965) and a few other obscure European productions yet! Also in LUST CAUTION the midnight dai pai dong scene was shot down from New Easter Terrace on Tin Hau Temple Road, but in the finished film you do not see much. Best wishes, H
Hello H, thanks for the nice comment. Actually, I do have a copy of Ferry to HK in the pile waiting to be looked at so it will make it on here at some point. I also have a list of about 60+ international movies that were filmed wholly or partially here, it's just finding copies of them (some are old) and then getting time to sit down and look at them all. It's a mammoth task! I even been given titles of some Thai, French and Spanish films that were filmed here. Just hard to obtain copies. However, I hadn't heard of Red Dragon until now, so many thanks for letting me know about that. I'll keep my eye out for it.
Cheers
Phil
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