Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Ferry to Hong Kong - Curt Jurgens (1959) - Former Kowloon Docks, Tsim Sha Tsui

We go back to the late 50's now for a story based on a real life incident involving a post civil-war refugee (a chap named Michael P. O'Brien) who had to spend several months to-ing and fro-ing between Hong Kong and Macau. Taking his twice daily trip between HK and Macau as the basis for the story, Curt Jurgens plays a down and out who is marked as an undesirable by both the Macau and HK authorities, meaning he isn't allowed to step foot in either.

As you can imagine we get to see a fair bit of coastline and waterside facilities in this film and the opening scene gives us a very similar one to that seen a year later in The World of Suzie Wong when William Holden disembarks from his ship into TST.

It's a brief glimpse, but we see a large ship tied up at what is now Ocean Terminal. You can see the distant shape of western Hong Kong Island in the background.

3 comments:

gweilo8888 said...

The ship, I believe, is the P&O Chusan. Note the distinctive bow overhang and the windows above / behind it:

http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/PO_Liners4.html

The Himalaya, Arcadia and Iberia have a similar overhang, but different windows.

Phil said...

well, I'll be darned. Can you also predict the future and make objects levitate? To be honest, those latter two aren't quite as impressive as naming that ship...:-)

gweilo8888 said...

I just tried levitating my coffee cup with the power of the mind, but it was a total failure. Only got three inches off the desk before I dropped it, and coffee everywhere. I should've been able to predict that! ;-)

She can't have been in Hong Kong *that* regularly, as I read that she was on the UK to Japan run with a stop-off in Hong Kong (and probably a fair few other stops on the way).

Looking at current cruises, I can't see one that does UK to Tokyo in less than 46 days, and Hong Kong to Tokyo is only six days -- so she probably wouldn't stop in both directions as it'd be just a fortnight apart. That means she'd have been in Hong Kong perhaps once every three months or so...

Somebody with better Google-fu than I could probably find a mention from a newspaper or old timetable that would be able to tie down perhaps three or four possible filming dates, each within a week or so, based solely on the presence of that ship. (And if there is anything else that helps with dates, you might be able to tie it down to one specific week.)

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